


walking backwards

by horriblekids



Series: '03verse (trying too hard) [2]
Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: 2003 AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:28:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 53,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29553546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horriblekids/pseuds/horriblekids
Summary: “Yeah. Um. So I got your mix CD,” Ashton tells him lamely. “I, um, I really liked it. It was… cool.” And god, he’s so lame. He wants to sink into the concrete, disappear, anything to be less embarrassing than he feels currently. Instead of disappearing, though, he puts his hand on top of Michael’s and leaves it there. Neither of them pull their hands away . After a minute Michael looks down at their hands and carefully turns his over so they’re palm-to-palm.2003 AU. The one where Michael’s a punk, Ashton overcomplicates things, and five years later 5 Seconds of Summer is on MTV. Loosely based on ‘Sk8er Boi’ by Avril Lavigne. Yes, really.
Relationships: Luke Hemmings/Calum Hood, Michael Clifford/Ashton Irwin
Series: '03verse (trying too hard) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2170044
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	walking backwards

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in 2014. Which, wow. I was pleasantly surprised that this didn't need many edits besides my blatant abuse of semicolons. Hopefully you guys enjoy it! This story is very near and dear to me, and there *is* a fully complete companion piece to this that I'll post sometime this week.
> 
> There are not one, but two Spotify playlists that go with this!
> 
>   * [A general soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Oy1fB0I0LjG2g0VPZHazo?si=CIB0d6AMQO6PxABBQGu5fA)
>   * [Michael's mixtape](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2cLRbBhmwQ7D8Oz62IxaKY?si=9JhhuD2rSDK3FMhsp6Elqg)
> 


_Walking Backwards_ by [Asaorg](http://asaorg.deviantart.com)

> kissing punk boys underneath highway overpasses, as their tipsy friends laugh and crack open their sixth beers. kissing punk boys until you rise up wordlessly and stalk over to a pocket of bushes to throw up the microwavable macaroni and cheese you had for dinner. kissing punk boys as you wear their sweatshirts, big heavy bags with thick white letters of their favorite bands cut across them.
> 
> punk boys preluding kissing you with, “sorry i taste like cigarettes.” punk boys poking you in the car with their studded vests. punk boys insisting on walking you to your door. punk boys saying, “do you know this band?” as you stare out the window and will the street to stop spinning. punk boys paying for your fries at the drive-through. punk boys paying for your beer. punk boys passing a bottle of “the good stuff” to you in the backseat. punk boys not concerned about their friends driving after a few beers. punk boys holding your hand while their friends are looking. punk boys asking their friends, “hey she’s cool huh?” as if you are not right there, laughing, giggling, smiling so big that you can tell you are not punk at all.
> 
> punk boys, their lips parted cooly, their eyes shining slits of slickness. punk boys, laughing in the dark, asking if you will call them. punk boys, their mouths slack holes filled with noise, kissing you.

_Friday Night_ , [Lora Mathis](http://lora-mathis.tumblr.com)

They have the radio on in the kitchen at work. Ashton hums along tunelessly to the song that’s playing - he can’t remember the name of it, doesn’t pay much attention to the charts these days - and chops vegetables cheerfully. It’s bright and clean inside the restaurant. He likes his job; he likes the routine of it, the cleaning and chopping and cooking. Once school lets out Lauren will bring Harry over and they’ll both sit in a booth next to the drink station, working on their homework, and the waitstaff will coo over how precocious Harry is at his age and give them refills on their sodas. Then after his shift ends at seven they’ll pile into his aging car to pick up dinner. He’ll leave a plate in the fridge for their mum and have his siblings in bed before she’s even home - she’s working three jobs again, trying to pay off the smashed windshield on her minivan from the summer - and then in the morning she’ll already be gone a long time before any of them are awake. Some of the hostesses are clustered by the big swinging doors that lead into the dining room, talking about some band or another that’s coming to town next week.

He puts the finishing touches on a slice of cheesecake - caramel drizzle and a little flower of whipped cream on the side - and hands it off. “Thanks, Ash,” the girl says, and strides off to deliver it to her table. One of these days he should really mention about them not calling him Ash anymore around the restaurant - it’s kind of a sore point for him, stupid baggage leftover from high school. For now he brushes it off and carries on with his work. The chef calls the orders out as they come up periodically; it’s mid-afternoon and so a bit of a lull is to be expected. It’s hot in the kitchen today and hot outside. When four o’clock rolls around and he can take his break, he wipes the sweat from his brow and heads out to the dining room to visit his siblings.

Lauren’s managed to charm the bar staff into switching the big flatscreen television to MTV. Technically they’re a sports bar and should have some sport with a bunch of bulked up meatheads chasing a ball with sticks on at all times, but it’s the middle of the day and nothing can stand between his little sister and Total Request Live. Never mind that the show is on the brink of cancellation or anything, he pities the man who stands between Lauren and her music. “Hey, guys,” he says, reaching out for a high five from Harry as he slides into the booth with them. “How was school?”

“Ugh, don’t even talk to me about it,” Lauren huffs. She’s got her math textbook out and out of the corner of his eye Ashton notices that she’s got some guy’s name doodled in an arrow heart on the margins of her notebook. Let her have her stupid crush, he thinks. It’s not like he’s one to talk about stupid high school crushes anyway. He steals some of her root beer float - which he remembers expressly forbidding the bar from giving to her because it will ruin her teeth - and ignores her protests about it. The sweet liquid trickles down his throat, a nice relief from room temperature tap water whenever he can manage it in the kitchen.

“What about you, punk?” he asks Harry, who’s quietly reading his book in the corner. “How was your day?”

Harry shrugs and chews on his thumbnail a little. It had been a huge battle to get him to stop sucking his thumb when he was little; Ashton is dreading their next dentist appointments because he’s sure that this chewing thing is pushing his front teeth forward. Lauren says, “His teacher told me those dumb kids’ve been bullying him again. You should probably talk to mum about it.” They exchange a grim look - they both know that the chances of getting their mum down to the primary school for anything other than a life-or-death emergency is unlikely at best. It’s not that she’s a bad mum. Their dad walked out when Lauren and Harry were little and Ashton’s been on his own picking up the pieces ever since. He doesn’t like to think about it.

With a sigh he says, “Don’t worry about it, Lo. I’ll handle it.” She launches into a story about some girl at school who’d been flirting with the boy she has a crush on. He’s only half-listening, unable to ever completely relax with so many things going inside his head at all times, but he nods in the right places and makes a face when Lauren tells about some party the other weekend. TRL goes to commercial and Lauren whips out her phone, texting her friends furiously while an ad for denture paste plays in the background. Harry pauses in his reading to ask what ‘erstwhile’ means. “I’m pretty sure it means in the past,” Ashton says uncertainly. Lauren looks it up for them and confirms it a moment later.

“‘Erstwhile: former or formerly as an adverb’,” she reads aloud. The television goes back to a close-up on Carson Daly’s aging face as he throws to a music video premiere. Ashton hadn’t been paying attention, so he didn’t catch the name of the group or anything. A punchy rock song starts up and he watches, half-interested, as the video plays on going between the ever-present video girls and then pans to the band doing a live performance. One of the waitstaff comes around and refills their drinks - he gets distracted for a second, orders himself a coffee - and then when he looks back up at the screen there’s a close-up on the band’s lead singer and his heart drops in his chest.

“Fuck,” he says before he can stop it from coming out. He watches the end of the video with his heart in his throat, it feels like, and recognizes all three members of the band. He went to high school with them. It annoys him that even now, five years out, he can’t scratch that old itch that Michael started in him when they were in twelfth year. For a second the world falls away around him; all he can see is Michael on the big screen, bleached blonde hair and cocky smile and tattoos a sore reminder of what could have been. And the song is good - Lauren’s singing along under her breath, Harry tapping his foot along to the beat - and he doesn’t know what to do other than run his fingers through his dirty hair and slump in his seat miserably. Fuck, Michael’s on MTV. He tries not to think about how good Michael looks.

Automatically Lauren goes, “Don’t swear,” and swats his hand. It’s good to know that even in the midst of her sixteen year old existential crisis she’s reliable and predictable, a calm in the center of the storm in his head and heart. He never thought - well, he hadn’t expected something like this. The last time he saw Michael’s band play they had sung this stupid song about pizza and then it had been graduation, too busy a time to put much thought into it other than getting everything in on time, all his scholarships for university, making sure everyone had the time off to go to his graduation ceremony. This version of Michael is different than he’d expected - but then he’s different too, isn’t he?

He pushes the thought aside. It’s not like they’re even in the same orbit anymore. No point in reopening old wounds for something that will never happen. He can get through the rest of his shift, do his reading for class in the morning and then if there’s time left in the day he can feel sorry for himself. “Sorry,” he says sheepishly. “Don’t repeat that word,” he tells Harry, who nods solemnly and returns to his reading. Ashton peers at the cover of the book - Eragon, he’d read it a few years ago himself - and smiles appreciatively at his sister.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Lauren says.

“Nope,” he groans. “Just the crushing realization that my life is going nowhere and I’ve amounted to nothing since I graduated high school,” and with that he puts his arms on the table and nestles his face between them, squeezes his eyes shut, and wonders when he’s going to stop feeling like such a tremendous failure. Michael’s band has a music video out. They probably have an album out too - not that he’s going to, like, go home and download it into his iTunes or anything stupid - and they’re probably on tour, probably sleep with a different groupie every night. And isn’t that a thought he’d rather not be having, given the history there, since it touches him in his sore places and makes his gorge rise. Lauren pats him on the shoulder sympathetically.

He’s glad that she’s too young to remember what had happened. “You’re not made of stone,” she reminds him. “I know I’m just your dorky little sister or whatever, but I’m here for you. We’re in this together now.” And he accepts it when she takes his hand and squeezes it. When did she get so mature? It’s hard for him sometimes to remember that she’s going to be old enough to drive in a few months. He dumps cream and sugar into his coffee when it arrives, lines the empty sugar packets up along the rim of the saucer neatly. Tonight he’ll worry about it, he decides.

The rest of his shift passes by in a blur of de-veining shrimp for the Tuesday night special and peeling potatoes. After a while he’s glad of it again, especially when someone commandeers the radio and switches it to the local rock station and then two of Michael’s songs play back to back. He grits his teeth and peels potatoes until the chef tells him he can go home; his hands feel wet and chalky from them even after he washes them. Once they’ve filled up the car with petrol, picked up a bucket of fried chicken for dinner and made their way home - his car’s engine coughing and sputtering the whole way, evidence that he needs his oil changed or some vastly expensive part replaced in it - Lauren plants herself in front of the television for her dumb teen dramas and Harry closes himself off in his bedroom with another book.

Ashton eats at the computer desk in the living room with headphones on to block out most of the sound of _Degrassi_ or whatever. He knows he shouldn’t, but he does it anyway - pulls up a search page for Michael’s band and scrolls through the sensationalist headlines on the first page of results. The Wikipedia page for 5 Seconds of Summer tells him that they were signed straight out of high school. It hurts him in his chest that Michael hadn’t said - but then again they hadn’t ended on a good note, exactly, so he’s not surprised - and he resigns himself to downloading their latest album and loading it onto his iPod. He’s also surprised that Luke had joined the band. The kid he remembers was small and skinny and kind of… unpopular, to put it lightly. Puberty had been kind to Luke anyway, and he watches a couple of YouTube videos of their live performances and marvels at the ease with which they mesh, playing off of each other’s strengths and genuinely having fun together. Not like you’re ever going to speak to any of them again, he reminds himself. It doesn’t do anything to dissolve the anxious mess in his chest about the shitty way he’d left things between them.

He doesn’t let himself dwell on it, just plays the album through his headphones while he revises his essay for his communications class. It’s good music anyway; he catches himself bopping along to a few of the songs, tapping his foot as he tries to think of a better way to phrase his second point to increase his word count for the assignment. Over his shoulder Lauren says, “If you change the font size on your quotation marks it will make it look like you’ve written more.”

He tsks at her and goes, “What are they teaching you in school these days anyway?”

“Terrible stuff,” she says somberly. He’s quick to click out of the YouTube video he has open - which may or may not be one of Michael’s stupid band doing another music video - but not quick enough that she doesn’t notice. “What’s this,” she teases, reaching over his shoulder for the mouse and maximizing the window. He swats at her and pulls one earbud out, lets it dangle down his shirtfront. “Someone has a crush.”Ashton grimaces. “Worse,” he says. “I went to high school with those guys.” He doesn’t mention the part where he had had a crush, preferring to avoid those feelings altogether. Lauren hugs him tightly and says good night before she heads off to her room for the night, leaving the television at full volume blaring reruns of the last season of _Survivor_. Could be worse, all things considered. He tells himself tomorrow will be a better day and finishes revising his essay, managing to submit it an hour before the deadline. It’s dead midnight by the time he makes it to his own bed, iPod forgotten by the computer downstairs, and sleep takes him quickly without any time to think about the worries in his head.

The quickest way to walk home from school is through the skate park. Ashton hates going through there, though, because it’s where all the troublemakers from his school hang out after class with liquor bottles wrapped up in brown paper bags, laughing and smoking cigarettes and bothering people on their skateboards. Normally he’d take the long way around. The universe has other plans for him however; it’s threatening to rain and he’s forgotten his work uniform at home, meaning he’s got to dash there and across town without getting too rained-upon. Clouds are already rolling in, unfriendly and grey, and the air is stiff with the crackling feeling of unborn lightning. He sets his jaw and pulls his messenger bag a little tighter across his chest. Most of them are busy on their skateboards or BMX bikes anyway; he doesn’t know why he cares so much what they do. The air rolls with a booming clap of thunder as he hops the fence into the skate park. Once he’s gotten back to his feet he pulls his hood up.

Some of them are gathered around the edge of the bowl, sharing a bottle between them. “Ashton, hey,” one of them calls to him. He pretends he hadn’t heard; Michael’s always trying to talk to him, trying to tell him about some stupid band he’s never cared about or another, leaving stupid notes in his locker at school all the time. Anyway he’s got his earbuds in without any music playing - hopefully that will send the message out that he doesn’t want to be bothered. He winces when he hears Michael scramble to his feet to follow along behind him. “Hey, hey, Ash,” Michael says.

“What,” he goes, pausing briefly to turn, hands on his hips, and look at Michael.

“Nothing, I guess,” Michael tells him, shoving his hands into the pockets of his shorts and shifting his weight between both feet awkwardly. The rain begins, gently misting down and wetting everything it touches. Ashton’s glad of it then that he’d already pulled his hood up, thinking of what the moisture would do to his fringe after he’s so painstakingly used his mum’s straighteners on it. He doesn’t understand why Michael keeps trying to talk to him. “Are you going to that party Saturday?” he wants to know.

Ashton looks at him, in his ripped up Ramones t-shirt and baggy tan Dickies shorts, and shrugs. “Probably have to work,” he says. These conversations only ever serve to remind him that he doesn’t get to have a normal life; he’s always rushing from one place to another, from home to school to work and across town to pick his brother up at the daycare they can barely afford and then shuttling both his siblings off to the babysitter on nights when no one will be home to look after them. Michael twists his fingers in the jelly bracelets adorning his wrist.

“Cool,” he says, flicking his fringe - which is much more meticulously straightened and styled than Ashton’s - out of his eyes, now beginning to drip with rainwater. “I’ll see you, then.” He doesn’t get why the punk kids always try to talk to him; he’s not one of them, doesn’t really talk to them ever, doesn’t like any of the same things as them. It’s different that they talk to Calum - he and Michael have been friends since third grade, kind of go together even though he’s into hip-hop and rap - but he’s never been able to make sense of it. But then there’s Ashton in his girl jeans and second-hand hoodie. He doesn’t listen to any of the bands they think are cool, doesn’t even like music that much, and it doesn’t make sense to him that they’re always trying to bother him. Maybe he just seems like an easy target.

“Yeah, later,” he says, and sprints off in the direction of his house. The babysitter’s late getting there and when he tracks mud into the house his mum sighs at him and frets over Harry, who’s just getting over a cold, and in the time it takes him to find his shoes he’s already late for work. Like, he could go to the party on Saturday if he wanted to, but what’s the point? Everyone knows him being invited is a pity thing. He probably should pick up a shift then, anyway, since college applications are due soon and he still hasn’t paid the fee to submit his. The party and all thoughts about it are quickly banished from his mind in favor of endless price checks and a cleanup in the produce section when someone’s baby throws up all over the eggplants. He wouldn’t know what to do at a party anyway.

By the time he gets home he’s exhausted. “They’re both asleep,” the babysitter tells him, his mum having already left for her nighttime shift at the hospital. Ashton thumbs through the wadded-up bills in his wallet and pays her, knowing full well that he’s going to go hungry at school tomorrow since they haven’t enough money to go grocery shopping until his next pay, at least, and it’s more important that Harry and Lauren eat properly than he does.

“Thanks,” he tells her, and waits by the window to make sure she’s safely in her parents’ car before locking up the house for the night.

He peeks in at Lauren, sound asleep in a nest of stuffed animals, and then at Harry, curled in a ball on his side with a thumb in his mouth. Once he’s certain that they’re safely in their beds, he takes a short, tepid shower before retiring to bed himself, homework undone. In the morning he wakes up before his alarm to finish the previous day’s geometry homework and, half-asleep, puts on a pot of coffee while he feeds his siblings a poptart and frozen waffles, respectively. By the time the caffeine actually jolts his system awake he’s already dropped Harry off at preschool and kissed Lauren goodbye before handing her off to the primary school’s crossing guard. It’s sad how much of his life he spends on autopilot just trying to keep his family afloat. There’s a flyer stuck in his locker printed on bright orange paper; he crumples it up and tosses it into the nearest trash can without much consideration.

He’s searching in his locker for a pen when he feels a tap on his shoulder, jabbing and insistent. “Are you coming on Saturday?”

“I don’t know,” he says, patting down his pockets for anything he can write with. Michael leans on the locker next to his and watches him. It’s kind of unnerving, actually, this fixation he has on Ashton and whatever he’s doing. He looks naked without his skateboard nearby, and there’s a scab on his knee that’s barely healed over. “Hey, do you have a pen I could borrow,” he sighs, despairing of his life.

Michael checks the various pockets of his pants and produces a ballpoint pen out of thin air. “You can keep it if you come,” Michael tells him, beaming hopefully. “My band’s playing, and it’d be awesome if you came.” Today he’s wearing a pair of baggy grey Dickies and checkered Vans, a threadbare hoodie thrown over top of everything else. The sleeves of the hoodie hang down over his hands. Ashton wonders if he’s wearing his usual assortment of jelly bracelets and sweatbands under it.

He says, finally, “I’ll think about it if I haven’t got anything else on,” and then the bell rings so he’s got to rush to his biology class anyway. In the middle of taking notes on cellular division he wonders if the flyer he’d thrown out was for Michael’s party, if Michael had left it there explicitly for him, if he’s an asshole for throwing it away like that. He doesn’t know why he cares, exactly. It’s this strange middling feeling in the hollow of his ribs - kind of a fond exasperation, if he’s being totally honest with himself - that he can’t quite put a name to. Sometimes Michael’s band shirts ride up in the middle of their music class, exposing a strip of pale skin above the waistband of his boxers, and Ashton doesn’t always look away as quickly as he should. He chides himself for thinking about it when he should be taking notes instead.

In between classes he snatches an orange flyer from somebody else’s locker and folds it up in his wallet for safekeeping. It’s not like he’s saying he’ll go by taking it, exactly, just that maybe he should do something his own age-ish for once instead of trying to fill the space his father had left when he’d ripped their family apart. By lunch his stomach’s growling - he hasn’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday, not that there’s much he can do about it - and rather than sit in the cafeteria staring jealously at other people’s sandwiches he sits at one of the picnic tables outside in the quad with his earbuds in, hoping that no one will bother him. His iPod’s the one thing he’s splurged on in the last year; he’d saved up for almost six months to buy it, working extra hours on top of his regular shifts to afford this one luxury. The click wheel sort of sticks, sometimes, but he doesn’t mind all that much. Most of the music on it is from his uncle - all classic rock and screeching vocals, some very early punk stuff he’d gotten off his cousin’s computer too - and he taps his fingers along to Def Leppard while he works on his history essay, which at this point is three days late. He’s so fucked.

When he sits in the quad for lunch he doesn’t really pay attention to the other students out there. It’s usually Michael and his stupid skateboard buddies anyway, doing grind tricks on the edges of the stonework planters surrounding the pitiful trees the school had planted a few years back in memoriam of a group of students who’d died in a car accident. Never mind that the reason the accident happened was because they were drunk driving, or anything, or that they have to sit through an assembly by Mothers Against Drunk Driving every year because of it. He doesn’t mind that they do their stupid tricks on the planters, then - he shades his eyes from the sun and watches for a moment when he gets bored of his history essay. Michael catches him watching them and does this dorky little wave, beams emphatically at him before nudging Calum and saying something into his ear that they both burst out laughing at. Ashton doesn’t quite get how their friendship works - Calum’s the type of guy who wears jeans with flames on them unironically and he wears a gold chain sometimes - but they’ve been best friends since they were eight years old.

Michael does some complicated flip thing with his board - kickflip, Ashton thinks it’s called - and then does a fifty-fifty grind on one of the planters. He’s shed the hoodie due to the scorching midday sun and Ashton can see the cut-up shirt he’s wearing. It doesn’t do much for him; he’s cut the sleeves off and the sides of it dip so low his entire side shows down to the curve of his waist. For a second he thinks about touching that exposed skin - then the illusion is shattered as Michael attempts to fakie back toward the group and fails magnificently, stumbling as he pushes off and then falling legs-over-shoulders down the stairs to the parking lot. Ashton has to hide his laughter behind his hand. The other skaters give him a hard time about it, shouting “Smooth!” as he climbs to his feet, grinning sheepishly. There’s a little blood dripping down one of his shins. Should put a plaster on that, Ashton thinks. He’s got his hand already in the zipper pouch of his bag before he remembers that they aren’t actually friends, he doesn’t need to rush over with his soothing voice on and patch up Michael’s scraped knees.

Instead he settles for sticking his tongue out and giving Michael a thumbs-up when he glances over again. He’d promised to have this essay in by the end of the school day. It’s going to have to be good enough as is; he can’t think of any more points to add in and his hand is starting to cramp. Plus, the growling of his stomach is getting distracting. Maybe he can take home some of the expired produce at the end of his shift tonight - that should tide him over for a couple of days at least. He’s almost condemned himself to dumpster diving when Michael plunks himself down on the other side of the picnic table uninvited.

“Hi,” Ashton says.

Michael pulls a bag of red Twizzlers out of his one of his many pockets and offers him the bag. “You want some?” Ashton plucks a couple out of the bag and chews the end of one gratefully. “So about the party,” Michael says. “It’s not a big deal if you don’t want to come, like, if you’ve got something else on… Just would be cool to see some familiar faces ‘cause I’m a bit nervous and we’re a bit crap, honestly.”

“I'm sure you’re fine,” Ashton tells him. The candy is the best thing he’s tasted in days, sickly-sweet and chewy and sticking to the fillings in his back teeth. “I’m gonna pull out my fillings eating this,” he groans, and then bites off another bit of licorice. He watches Michael nibble at his own piece delicately, the way his lips are almost the same shade of red as the candy. “I might go, though. I don’t really like parties that much.”

“Never see you at any,” Michael comments.

Ashton shrugs. “Like I said. Plus I usually stay at home with my siblings at the weekend,” he says lamely.

As the bell’s ringing to signal the end of lunch, Michael finishes with, “Rather see you at parties than all the stupid preps who show up. Fuck those guys, seriously.” He slings his backpack over his shoulder and tucks his skateboard under his arm, off to his next class with a jaunty little wave. Ashton still doesn’t understand anything about him. He’s left his hoodie at the picnic table though; Ashton folds it up and puts it in his bag to keep it safe until they see each other next. Given the way things have been going, it probably won’t be long. He’s dwelling on the fond look Michael gives him every time they speak. It’s not like the way he looks at any of his friends; it’s not like anything, really, and Ashton works hard to fight the warm, pleasant feeling it leaves in his chest. He doesn’t like guys.

The rest of the day goes by slowly. He passes his essay to his history teacher and ducks under the weight of the disappointed look he receives in return. By the end of school he’s already dead tired - but then he’s got to get to work, has to get changed in one of the bathroom stalls at school so he’s not late two days in a row. He can’t afford to get written up right now; he needs his job too much to risk messing it all up. And then when he does get to work it’s shipment day, meaning he gets to spend the six hours lugging heavy pallets of product around their stock room and damaging out rotten fruits and vegetables. At the end of it all he’s bone-tired, still has homework to do and no idea where he’s going to conjure up the time to do it from.

Harry and Lauren are already put to bed when he gets home. He’s too exhausted to do anything besides pay the sitter, mumble a ‘thank you’ in her general direction and lock up for the night. Their mum’s left him a plate in the microwave - it’s just some alfredo and a piece of garlic bread, nothing too elaborate since she probably made it in half an hour with one foot already out the door - but after he’s heated it up it’s warm and delicious, best thing he’s eaten in days. It’s too much effort to wash his plate and fork so he leaves those for the morning, figures he’ll do them before he leaves for school. It’s his mum’s day to drop them both at school, so he can sleep an extra hour if he wants. As nice as the extra hour would be on either side of the alarm, he’s got homework to do. He’s awake until two or maybe three in the morning working on late assignments. The printer jams up as he’s trying to get his lab reports ready in his folder for biology.

“Awesome,” he mutters, pulling the paper out of the printer tray and straightening up the stack. It makes a groaning, distinctly paper-crunching noise in response and spits out a gnarled-up copy of his lab report - meaning he’ll have to pull the damn thing apart to get the other sheets of paper causing the jam from between the spool and the ink cartridge. What he wouldn’t give for a nice laserjet printer like the ones they’ve got in the library at school. Of course they’re prohibitively expensive, but he can dream. Finally the damned machine prints out a good copy of his assignment and he clicks out of the text editor, content to browse the web for a few minutes before he goes to bed. Sometimes it helps him clear his head a bit. Can’t hurt to check Myspace; he has a page like everyone else, though he seldom uses it and can’t even think of enough people to put in his Top 8. They’re all the same anyway, pretty much, so he doesn’t know why he bothers.

On a whim he clicks over to Michael’s page, checks to see what his profile song is for the week. It’s some band he’s never heard of and they’re not very good, he thinks, but he listens to the song the whole way through anyway with his earbuds plugged into the computer speakers. There’s a new profile picture up, too, which is yet another grainy photo of him with his arm outstretched to hold the camera at an angle, and as usual he’s looking up at the camera with his eyes wide and lips pursed slightly - the classic Myspace pose. It doesn’t exactly give a clue to his inner psyche or anything. Though Ashton knows if he really wanted to do that he could click through the link to Michael’s Livejournal. That always feels a bit like reading someone’s diary, though. He does notice that the bands in Michael’s Top 8 have changed again - he likes that they’re always bands, not actual people - and he checks out the new band’s page as well, blinking against the horribly clashing colors and hard-to-read text.

He has to remind himself that they’re not actually friends. But he’s hovering over the friend request button anyway, and he chalks it up to sheer exhaustion that he actually clicks on it. It’s not like Michael’s going to accept his request. After that he really does go to bed; it’s starting to get light outside and his head hurts. No one has to know if he downloads all the Fall Out Boy songs he can find on Kazaa, which turns out to be, like, three total. He can put them on his iPod in the morning.

The rest of the week creeps by unremarkably. Lauren’s got the sniffles again and Ashton’s perpetually pressing a tissue under her nose, begging her to please blow instead of sucking it all back so it can contribute to her post-nasal drip. He can’t stand the sound of her sniffling. He spends Saturday at home with her and Harry, who’s content to lie on his stomach watching Arthur and sucking his thumb. Their mum comes home midday and doses Lauren with some children’s cough syrup, dropping a kiss on each of their heads - even Ashton’s, much against his spirited protests - and tells them, “I’ve arranged a sitter for you guys tonight in case Ashton has plans.”

Ashton doesn’t tell her that his plans for the evening involve watching reruns of _The O.C._ and _Laguna Beach_ back to back. “Thanks, mum,” he says, and goes back to the massive pile of homework he’s slowly making his way through. He’s been working on his Macbeth project for what seems like hours now, though it’s barely pushing one in the afternoon. It might be possible that he’s burning himself out. Any other day he’d take his siblings on a walk to the park or something to relieve the boredom that’s building up in him, but Lauren’s sniffling quietly on the couch under her quilt and in another hour or so Harry will be ready to go down for his nap. He double-clicks on the internet browser instead and logs into his seldom-used Livejournal account. No one on his friends list has done anything interesting lately; one of them’s updated their badly written Harry Potter fanfic, which he mostly ignores, and so he quickly moves on to Myspace instead. It’s a funny kind of voyeurism, poking around in the lives of the popular kids at school and watching the ever-rotating cast of their Top 8 lists change week after week.

He’s got a new friend request notification in his inbox. Curious to know who it is, he clicks on it and finds a request from Calum. Not that they’re really friends - he thinks they’ve said three words to each other total - but he accepts it anyway and goes to his own friends list and sees that Michael’s accepted his request as well. Maybe he should update his profile, he thinks, feeling strangely inadequate looking at his bare white profile with a single profile picture of him that’s from last year. That being said he doesn’t know any HTML, and getting layouts from another site is for losers. He decides to leave his dismal profile the way it is and resolves to take a new profile picture instead. Mum keeps their digital camera in the cupboard with the printer paper and the blank CD-R’s that he puts music onto for her; he’ll just have to find the cord to it so he can put them onto the computer and edit them.

Obviously he can’t take Myspace photos in the living room in full view of his siblings, so once he’s found the camera cord he tells Lauren, “Watch Harry for a bit, I have stuff to do,” and then he goes up to his room to find something to wear. He can’t take pictures in his trackies with no shirt on and his fringe un-straightened. He’d about die if anyone ever saw him like this; it takes him an hour and three different shirts to look presentable enough for the camera, and then it occurs to him that he’s getting this worked up over a stupid website and feels stupid about it. By the time he’s got his fringe straightened he’s over the entire thing. He doesn’t know how people can upload a new profile picture every day and he doesn’t understand what the point of it all is, much less why he’s doing all of it to fit in with people he has no interest in talking to. Still, he ends up taking pictures anyway, holding the camera out at various angles and hoping it ends up getting a decent shot of his face and not, like, his crotch or something.

Lauren comes upstairs eventually and just opens the door to his room and walks in. “What are you doing?” she asks, dragging her quilt along behind her like a cape.

“Get out of my room,” he says, immediately setting the camera aside. She ignores him to sit on his bed cross-legged, staring up at him with the accusatory type of look only eleven year olds are capable of. He goes “Ugh, whatever,” and shoos her out of the room with promises of macaroni and cheese once he’s done on the computer.

When they get downstairs she turns to him and asks, “What were you taking pictures of yourself in your room for? That’s weird,” and does a huge sucking sniffle.

Ashton just sighs at her and hands her another tissue. “Would you please blow your nose,” he bitches. “And you wouldn’t understand, you’re too young.” He connects the camera to the computer and starts the wizard to upload his pictures, figuring that he can do the album from their last family vacation at the same time. While they’re transferring he makes Lauren and Harry a pot of macaroni as promised and even uses the last of the milk to make it extra creamy for them. Lauren helps him with the washing-up - dries the dishes and puts them away - and she puts Harry down for his nap without complaint. Once his pictures are uploaded he sits down at the computer again and makes a folder for the family vacation ones, then opens the pictures he’d taken in the afternoon and goes through them, quickly deleting the ones that are of his arm or have his thumb in the corner of the frame. He doesn’t want everyone to think he’s dumb or that he doesn’t know how to work a camera.

Finally he settles on one where he looks kind of moody yet bored and uploads it as his new profile picture without comment. Some people put song lyrics as a kind of caption on theirs, but he’s not that into music and hasn’t got a lot to say about the existential teen angst that everyone else seems to be going through. Instead he reads through the endless bulletins in his inbox of people filling out pointless surveys in lieu of finishing his homework. He’ll have most of the day on Sunday to finish it - he needs a break or he’s going to lose his mind. It’s mind-numbing going through people’s profiles; he doesn’t actually care about the friend fights over someone being moved down a spot in someone else’s Top 8. He’s okay with not having people spam his page with pointless comments the way some of the popular kids do. The page is just kind of there for when he’s bored or wants to catch up on everyone else’s lives. It gives him a way to have the normal high school experience without actually having to get involved or do much of anything. Which is good, because he hasn’t got time for anything more than that.

When he refreshes the page he’s got a new bulletin sent by Michael about the party that night. There are a lot of exclamation marks and random capitals proclaiming that his band is playing. He knows it was sent out to everyone - that’s the point of bulletins basically, to spam everyone they know with complaints about parents or surveys that show how quirky and unique and ‘so random’ they are - but at the same time he’s kind of pleased to have some variety in his inbox. And he clicks back over to Michael’s profile page to see what’s up, and the little orange and green ‘Online Now!’ icon flashes up at him like a beacon. “Alright, alright,” he tells the little blinking icon. “I’ll go to the stupid party.”

He tells himself it would be a waste if he didn’t; he’d already gotten dressed and fixed his hair, so he might as well see if this party is the type that includes free drinks and pizza. When the babysitter arrives he tells her what time Harry and Lauren need to go to bed and gives her the bills that his mum had left, then hops on his bike and pedals over to the neighborhood that the party is supposed to be at. It’s already after dark, so he expects that most people are already there. He won’t stay for long - just check out Michael’s band, linger long enough to prove that he’s an actual person with an actual social life and he hasn’t only shown up to see anyone in particular - and he definitely won’t drink. The party is in full swing as he’d expected when he gets to the house and locks his bike up to the streetlight. It’s not the sort of party where anyone needs to knock; the front door is ajar, loud music pouring out into the twilight.

It’s unclear whose house this is supposed to be. Ashton weaves his way through the groups of people talking or not-talking or not not-talking to the kitchen; there’s a cooler full of drinks and a keg on the kitchen table with a stack of red cups beside it. He takes a soda from the cooler, figuring it’s better to have a sealed drink in case people are shitty. The band is set up in the living room. It’s hard to see over the tops of people’s heads, so he kind of skirts around the edge of the throng of people to lean against the wall and sip his drink and pretend he doesn’t care. The band is just Michael and Calum and a drum machine that only does three different beats - they sing a couple of cover songs that aren’t quite terrible, and then an original song apparently about pizza - and he watches the whole time, Michael’s pale arms moving as he plays his guitar and shouts into the microphone. They make a bunch of terrible jokes between songs. Still, people cheer at the end of it and Ashton lingers while they put their guitars away and roll up the audio cables messily.

Michael looks up and catches sight of him. “You came!” he says excitedly, nearly tripping backward over one of their amps. There are sweat marks at the neck of his t-shirt; Ashton tries and fails not to think of those days when summer had been waning and Michael’s shirt had ridden up in music class and he’d gotten an eyeful of the sweat collecting at the base of his spine.

“Yeah,” Ashton replies.

“Cool,” Michael says, twisting the studded bracelet on his wrist around nervously. “I wanna get a drink. Come with me?” And Ashton follows after him back to the kitchen, watches as everyone within arm’s reach slaps him on the back or gives out high-fives and shouts over the music about how cool his band is. They hover near the keg for a while, neither of them saying anything though he does catch Michael looking at him a lot. He doesn’t know if this is, like, something people do at parties - is standing near each other not speaking the cool thing to do or is he just so insufferably lame he can’t even pick up on social conventions - or if it’s Michael being weird again.

“So do people, like, dance at these parties or is it mostly standing around like this?” Ashton asks.

Michael shakes his head, says, “I dunno, I usually leave after all the preps start showing up and ruining the atmosphere with their shitty taste in music,” and jerks his head at a group of similarly blonde girls standing in a circle with red cups in their hands, giggling and tossing their fruit-scented hair in that way that every popular girl seemed to know how to do instinctively. Their polo shirts and miniskirts are something of a uniform, really; Ashton’s not judging them but he can sort of see why Michael and his lot hate them so much. He feels a bit out of place at the party - not many people wearing hand-me-down rock t-shirts or girl jeans at their school, and he realizes that Michael’s not as brave without his herd of punks in their baggy pants and Hot Topic wristbands to back him up.

“Let’s leave then,” Ashton tells him. “There must be something better to do tonight.” The words _‘besides, I only came to this party for you’_ run through his head unsolicited. Michael mumbles something about saying ‘bye’ to Calum and follows him out to the front yard of whosever’s house it is. They walk down the street side by side, Ashton rolling his bike alongside, not saying anything. He knows that they’d loaded their instruments into Calum’s mum’s SUV, so he wonders if Calum already left the party or if he’s hanging out with his other friends or something. Michael has his ever-present skateboard tucked under his arm.

“Your hair looks cool,” Michael goes.

“Um, thanks,” Ashton says. “I liked your band,” he says, thinking of the way Michael had held his guitar, the way he’d looked while he was singing that stupid Green Day song all confident and cocky. It had been weird to see him shed his usual awkwardness and become this new person; Michael’s elbow bumps against his as they walk and he doesn’t pull his arm away like he usually would.

They end up walking all the way back to the skate park. Ashton sits under the lamppost in the center and leans his back against it. Michael follows suit soon after. “Can I tell you something?” he asks.

“Yeah, sure,” Ashton says, fiddling with his sleeves.

The night is hot and pressing. It takes a long time for Michael to gather his thoughts. When he does, he shifts uncomfortably on the concrete and says, “So I think I might like boys,” and Ashton has no idea what to do with that information. He’s not, like, grossed out or upset or anything - he just doesn’t know how he’s supposed to react.

“Me too,” he says quietly. He’s never admitted it to anyone before - never said it out loud, never allowed himself to think about it, always put it in a box at the back of his mind to be dealt with at a later date. Now it’s out there in the universe, this looming, tangible thing about himself, and it’s less terrifying than he thought it would be. They sit in silence for a few minutes more and then he laughs harshly. “It’s not, like, a big deal,” he says. “Just a thing I’m kind of not-dealing with.”

“Yeah,” Michael agrees. “So.”

“Yep,” he says. Then, “Show me some of your skate tricks. I’ve never - I don’t know, I don’t know anything about skateboarding. Teach me.” He’s reaching for anything else to change the subject, wants to shove those thoughts back into their safe box at the back of his head, un-dealt with. He doesn’t want to think about the alternative, everything he didn’t say - like sometimes he thinks about kissing Michael, maybe, or the fond annoyance he feels when he sees them doing their stupid tricks and bailing out on the pavement, scraping their knees and bloodying their knuckles - and he doesn’t want to deal with this, whatever-this-is. These are Livejournal kind of thoughts, not middle of the night thoughts, not alone at the skate park with the boy he kind of likes, kind of can’t stand thoughts. Instead of dealing with it he sits back and watches Michael explain the difference between an ollie and a kickflip under the bright lights, laughing when he falls.

After a bit he wanders over to sit at the edge of the big ramp and Michael tries to do a tail stall and falls off his board. Ashton bursts out laughing and he looks offended. “Stop laughing, you dick,” he whines. “I’d like to see you do better.”

“I think I’ll pass,” he calls to Michael, who’s at the bottom of the ramp. “It’s getting late though; walk me home?”

He climbs down and they walk slowly back to his house - well, he walks slowly with his bike and Michael rolls along on his skateboard effortlessly - and Michael hangs around while he locks his bike in the shed. His mum’s left the porch light on for him. “Never seen your place before,” Michael comments. “Your mum waiting up for you?”

“Nah, she works two jobs, she’s probably asleep,” Ashton says awkwardly. They’re hovering near each other on his doorstep; he doesn’t know what that means, what he’s supposed to do.

“Alright,” Michael says with a small nod. “Um, did I already say thank you for coming tonight? ‘Cause it meant a lot, y’know, to see you there.”

Ashton fumbles with his house key in his hands and nods, too. “Yeah, you said… It was cool,” he goes. “Thanks for asking me, and everything.” He feels it would be saying too much to admit that he’d had a fun time, or whatever. He’s pretty sure his hands shaking will betray his feelings anyway, but it feels important that he at least try to save face and not seem so obvious about… the whole whatever-this-is. Or maybe it’s all in his head - maybe he’s reading too much into it, maybe he’s a victim of wishful thinking.

Then Michael says, “I think you’re pretty cool, so like,” and steps in a bit, hands hovering nervously around Ashton’s before he closes the gap between them, pressing their lips together quickly before he pulls away looking startled and goes, “Um. Sorry. I should probably… probably go.” And Ashton lets him, his heart thrumming furiously in his chest, figuring that he’ll set things right between them in the morning once he’s figured out what he’s supposed to do. He liked it - liked being kissed, he thinks, and hanging out with Michael too - but he doesn’t quite know how to go about it without making everything weird. It occurs to him when he’s lying awake in bed later that he should’ve said something, though he doesn’t know what he would have said anyway and he’s never been kissed before so it’s not like he knows what to do with that, either.

There’s no time, really, to think about the Michael thing until he reaches the weekend. By then he’s already worked most of his shifts for the week and had to do two annoyingly difficult forum posts for his online class; it’s mostly slipped his mind until he goes to work for his Saturday afternoon shift. When he gets to the restaurant, already in his black pants and white button-front shirt, his manager’s flitting around in a tizzy bothering the bar staff about something or other. Probably they’ve added new drinks to the menu or something, he thinks, and starts to head to the back to wash up before he starts. He never gets that far, however - she corners him by the kitchen doors and goes, “I know you’ve said a thousand times you’ll never wait tables, but we’ve had two girls call in sick and we’re short-handed for tonight. Do you think you could manage a couple tables for me just this once?” and flashes him what she clearly thinks is a winning smile. If he were straight it would probably have some kind of effect on him.

As it is, he almost says no until he remembers that waitstaff get to keep their tip money - and he could really use the extra money at the moment. He’s got a parking ticket he needs to pay off; not that it’s a lot of money but the fact remains that it’s money he doesn’t have. So, with a sigh, he says, “Just this once, okay?” and ties the dumb little apron around his hips and hunts down a notepad and pencil from behind the bar.

With the help of the hostesses, he catches on to the rhythm of waiting tables pretty fast; as soon as he sees that a new group is sat in his area he goes over to them, introduces himself and writes his name on the sheet of brown paper in crayon, takes their drink order and while he’s waiting for that to be filled checks on his other tables or brings out food. Then he’s supposed to check back in and make sure everyone has what they need - “Is everyone ready to order?” he asks brightly, pasting a smile on his face so huge that it hurts his cheeks, and passes paper-wrapped straws around to his table - and he writes down the entrées in the order they’re given to him before he scurries back to the point-of-sale system to punch it all in. The time flies by faster than it does when he’s working in the kitchen, and to his surprise he finds he’s actually enjoying himself joking with customers and calling drink orders to the bar staff.

In his downtime he rolls silverware up inside the cloth napkins they use and stacks them in a big plastic bin behind the bar. The other benefit to waiting tables instead of working in the kitchen is that - aside from the obvious perk of not being hot and sweaty all night - he gets unlimited drinks, so he may be a bit hopped up on caffeine by the time people start coming in for dinner and the pay-per-view wrestling match in the evening. Considering he’s never done it before he thinks he’s quite good at waiting tables.

Of course, then everything has to turn to shit on him. He’s got another table that’s just been seated and he doesn’t get a chance to take their drink orders until he’s checked on the table next to them. Since they’re seated in a booth he doesn’t get a good look at them until he’s standing right in front of them and it’s sheer dumb luck that he manages to collect his jaw off the floor as quickly as he does. “Um, hi?” he starts off, stumbling over his words. “I’m Ashton, I’ll be taking care of you tonight.” His hand shakes as he writes his name in big block letters on the paper in red crayon. Because of course - as luck would have it - he’s standing in front of Michael, Calum and Luke in his stupid work clothes and his voice is shaky and all he can see, all he can think is that Michael is right there.

Michael and Calum exchange some kind of significant non-verbal conversation using only their eyebrows. “Hey, good to see you,” Calum offers in a tone of voice that implies that it’s not good at all, their seeing each other. Ashton supposes that he probably deserves the hard edge in Calum’s voice.

“Yep,” he says quickly, “You guys too. Shall I get everyone started with some drinks?” And he whips out his notepad and pencil, even though he doesn’t really need them, to busy his hands with something. He wants to sink into the floorboards so badly. Perhaps he can convince his manager he’s come down with some kind of debilitating, flesh-eating virus and needs to be sent home immediately. Even though he’s purposely not looking, he can feel Michael’s gaze searing into him. He writes down their drink orders and hurries off, checking in with his other tables in a half-hearted attempt to calm his nerves before he has to go back with their drinks. They’ve all ordered pints, too, so if he falters and spills their drinks it’s going to be a huge mess, a huge scene, and he really doesn’t feel like fucking up and giving anyone more ammunition to hate him with.

He’s careful to hold onto the tray when he delivers their drinks to them. “Alright,” he says, passing the pint glasses off to their respective person, “Rickard’s Red for Calum, a Heineken for Luke, and Stella for… you.” His voice falters when Michael’s fingers brush his own, taking the glass from him. “Um, do you guys need a few more minutes or can I grab you some starters or something?”

Michael holds his gaze for a minute, burning right through all the resolve he had built up. “I think we’ll need a minute,” he says. “You look good, Ash.”

“I-I, um, cool,” Ashton stammers. “Check in with you guys in a few minutes, then,” and he hurries away again to look after his other tables. Michael’s words play over and over in his head. ‘You look good’, what’s that supposed to mean? He doesn’t have time to dwell on it; he’s got another table that was just seated and he takes their drink order, relays it to the bar, and takes a couple of entrées over before he returns to the table to take their orders. “Hey guys,” he says, hoping his voice sounds braver than he feels. “You about ready to order?”

They each rattle off their order, Michael purposely taking the longest and looking at him the whole time. “Are you on the menu?” he asks cheekily, lips curving up into a smirk that Ashton knows is intentional and meant only for him. He can’t answer, just ducks his head and blushes and writes everything down before promising he’ll return shortly. He doesn’t - what are they doing home, the internet had said they would be on tour until the end of the month and then they were supposed to be writing for their new record in Los Angeles - he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with all the longing and hurt building up inside his chest; the way things had ended is his fault, entirely, and he feels like he has no right to want or to feel this way after all the things he’d said. When he does go back, balancing the three steaming plates on one arm, they’re locked in a deep conversation. He feels weird interrupting, so he drops the plates off without fanfare and tells them to flag him down if they need anything, making a mental note to bring them fresh pints when he has a spare moment.

It feels heavy, Michael’s eyes on him the whole time he’s waiting tables. Out of the corner of his eye he’s watching too; the way Michael still gestures wildly with his hands as he talks, how he throws his head back as he laughs, his exposed neck and collarbone each time his destroyed t-shirt slips down his shoulder. He returns once more to check in and make sure everything’s going well - Calum and Luke nod, Luke staring at him silently - and passes around new drinks to everyone, avoiding eye contact. “Cool,” he says finally. “Let me know if you need anything else, I’ll be back with you in a bit.”

“You look stressed, mate, have a shot on me,” says Niall who works at the bar, handing him a shot glass authoritatively. He downs it in one go, wincing at the taste, and then Niall claps him on the back and slides his drink orders onto a tray. “Keep your chin up, you’re doing really great.” The kind words help to bolster his spirits a bit, and when he goes back to the booth to deliver the new round of drinks the smile on his face is genuine.

“Another round of drinks, lads,” he says, and then he’s off to look after his other tables. He’s getting tipped surprisingly well; he wonders if anyone can tell it’s his first day as service staff and - with surprise - he realizes he would do it again, if anyone asked him to. The band is locked deep in conversation when he drops off the final bill. They pay in cash and he watches them leave from across the bar.

Niall nudges him as he passes and whispers, “You’re kind of staring, mate,” in his ear jokingly. He had been, though - staring at Michael in the tightest jeans he’s ever seen on a man, how long his legs look, the movement of his shoulders as he’d moved - and he has to collect himself for a moment before he goes to clear the table off for the next group. They’re busy with the pay- per-view event on, so there’s no time for him to linger over his personal drama. When he goes over, Michael’s scrawled his phone number on the back of the bill and Ashton doesn’t know how he’s supposed to take that. He’s never known in the whole time they’ve known each other. It’s not becoming of him to have one-night stands, and especially with Michael, and he doesn’t want Michael to think that he can just come back after five years and get him into bed just like that. Ashton’s not - he’s not like some cheap band slut, he has morals - and it makes him bristle at the implications that go along with it.

He doesn’t end up texting the number, but he does fold the slip of paper up carefully and put it in his pocket. When he cashes out at the end of the night he’s made almost eighty dollars in tips - and holy shit, that’s more than he makes in a night - cementing his decision to ask if he can become a part of the waitstaff permanently. It wouldn’t be that difficult a transition. He decides that he’ll ask about it on his next shift; it’s late and he’s surprisingly tired after dashing back and forth all night, and he wants nothing more than to take a long, hot shower and get to bed.

Ashton doesn’t deal with it until the following week. He has to get to school early anyway - his geometry teacher wants him to come in for extra tutoring since he’s falling behind - and so he wakes up an hour early that Monday to drive his mum to work and then drop Harry and Lauren off. When he pulls into the school parking lot, it’s deserted except for a few of the teachers’ cars parked in the staff lot and - as his luck would have it - Michael and Calum doing stupid skate tricks off the rail in front of the quad. He freezes up for a moment when he sees them. It would be cowardly, he thinks, to go the long way around and use the back doors to the school - not to mention that they probably aren’t unlocked yet - but he really doesn’t know if he can face Michael after what happened. And he feels stupid about it, especially if he’s the only one who’s spent time thinking about it or freaking out. It was just a kiss, he reminds himself. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Michael probably hadn’t meant anything by it anyway; he’d been drinking and it was late.

He puts his earbuds in and turns the volume up on his iPod, praying that they won’t try to talk to him. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Michael saying something to Calum and looking between them, and then as he’s going up the steps Michael falls in step with him. “Ash,” he says. “Don’t avoid me, please?”

“I’m not avoiding you,” Ashton tells him. Except that he totally had been, and he doesn’t really know why he’d even tried because Michael can see through it every time.

“I fucked up on Saturday,” Michael says. “You told me something really important and I kind of took advantage and I’m really sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have taken my screwed-up feelings out on you. Like, that’s pretty lame.” He can tell that Michael’s genuinely sorry, too, because he’s not making some stupid joke or smirking like he usually does. Ashton doesn’t know how to tell him that he wanted it - wanted to be kissed, wants to be liked - so he doesn’t say anything at all for a moment. They’re standing in front of the doors to the school like that, looking at each other but never entering the other’s personal space, and he both wants to close the gap between them and wants to run away; he doesn’t know which is more terrifying. All he can think about is how there’s no time for him to have a sexuality crisis right now.

He says, “It’s okay, I’m not mad or anything,” and shrugs lamely.

“So we’re good?” Michael asks hopefully.

“Yeah, we’re cool,” he agrees. “I’ve got a tutoring thing to get to, though. I’ll see you later?” He leaves before he can say anything stupid, like that he likes Michael’s stupid high-tops with the pink laces in, or get asked to another party that he’ll then feel obligated to go to because they’re friends now, or something, or more than mutual acquaintances - which he doesn’t know how to deal with, either, and so it’s easier to just… not deal with it. Like everything else in his life, he puts those feelings in a box at the back of his mind to deal with later. He doesn’t know when ‘later’ is, exactly.

When he sees Michael on the quad during lunch they avoid each other. He purposely sits on the other side and puts his earbuds in and works on homework the whole time. It’s easier to put everything out of his mind. The only hurdle he has to face in the afternoon is music class, and he can avoid that by focusing on his sheet music - even though he knows everything by heart at this point in the semester - instead of looking at Michael like he usually does. And he hadn’t realized how much time he spent in a day looking at Michael until he started forcing himself not to. It’s reasonable to assume at this point that he has a slight crush, and that’s something he doesn’t know how to process. Once he’s finished with his history homework for that evening he allows himself to watch the punk kids do their dumb tricks on the rail for the rest of the period.

Maybe if he can figure out what it is he likes about Michael he can find counters for all of those things and slowly wean himself off. It’s definitely not his fashion sense - today he’s wearing a pair of Dickies that hang off the swell of his ass, held up very narrowly by sheer force of will and a studded belt, a blink-182 shirt that’s clearly seen better days, and his scuffed-up checkered Vans - and it’s not his taste in music, either, since he’s seen the contents of Michael’s iPod and they’re all bands he’s never heard of. His hair’s stupid, too, that stupid emo haircut that everyone’s into at the moment with the long straightened fringe and the hair all spiked up at the back. And he’s awkward as hell - Ashton’s seen him wipe out on his skateboard so many times he’s lost count - so it can’t be that. He gives it considerable thought and can’t figure out what it is, which is infinitely frustrating because if there’s no tangible something there then how is he supposed to make it go away?

In music class when he’s not playing his drums - and since they’re on a bit of a classical music kick at the music department head’s whim, the most he has to do is lightly tap the cymbals every once in a while - he spends time puzzling over it, wondering why he’s so irrationally fond of Michael and his Sharpied-on fingernails. He’s got something written on the inside of his arm, too, but from where he’s sitting he can’t make it out and most of the class period is dedicated to agonizing over what it could be. Ashton wonders if he did the nail thing by himself or, meanly, if one of the girls that hang around with his crowd every once in a while was trying to get flirty and coy and asked to draw on him during class. It’s probably stupid song lyrics anyway.

It’s not like he has work tonight to distract himself with. He’d gotten his schedule mixed up for the week, thought he worked Monday afternoon instead of Tuesday, and it had been a scramble in the morning to get hold of their usual babysitter to let her know about the mix-up. So now he’s got countless hours to fill at home while he looks after Lauren and Harry. He doesn’t feel like fighting Lauren over watching _7th Heaven_ tonight - she’s still got the sniffles anyway and he doesn’t want to be mean - and he could get ahead on his homework, but he already knows he’s going to end up sitting on the computer all night staring at his instant messenger and reading everyone else’s away messages. He doesn’t know why he bothers to log in, honestly, since no one ever messages him. It’s unclear whether people actually talk to each other over IM or if it’s a kind of status contest to see who can post the most obscure-yet-meaningful lyrics in their away window. Ashton’s never set an away message; he hasn’t really had anyone that he’s been close enough with to care, which is why the only person in his Myspace Top 8 is Tom from Myspace still.

He logs into his Myspace when he gets home from school and scrolls through the endless onslaught of bulletin surveys, when he sees the notification pop up that he’s got a new comment on his profile picture. Lauren’s cuddled up on the couch under her quilt, thankfully out of view of the computer monitor, and Harry’s entertaining himself with his speak-and-spell thing on the carpet in front of the television. He clicks the link and holds his breath as the page slowly loads one pixel at a time. It’s from Michael, and all it says is ‘nice eyes’ followed by a winky face. He doesn’t know what the wink is supposed to imply; he doesn’t know if he’s supposed to reply or even what he would say. Generally he knows that people aren’t supposed to acknowledge Myspace as a thing offline - he’s seen a ton of people flirting on each other’s pages and then pretend nothing happened in school - so he’s quite confused about how he’s supposed to react.

“Hey, what do you think it means when someone sends you a winky face?” he asks Lauren.

She makes a face and goes, “How should I know, I’m eleven. Can I play Neopets now or what?” Ashton sighs and logs out of his account. Michael thinks he has nice eyes. He’s always thought that they were average; no one ever says nice stuff about brown eyes. He trades places with Lauren and lies on the couch, making sure that he can still see what she’s doing in case she accidentally gets onto a porn site or something.

Once, when his mum and siblings had been at their grandparents’ for the weekend and he’d stayed behind because he’d had to work, he’d tried getting onto a porn site and was horrified by the number of pop-ups that it launched and the flashy .gifs above every single grainy QuickTime video that promised really titillating stuff - but in reality, all it had done was freeze his computer and he’d had to spend a long afternoon removing viruses before someone came home and saw. No actual porn videos were watched that weekend, and when his mum came back he’d been so wracked with the guilt that he’d confessed the whole thing and then she’d laughed at him. He wonders now what would’ve happened if he had tried to go on a gay porn site instead; he’s kind of curious about it now that he’s thought about it some.

“Can you watch Harry for a bit? I just remembered I was supposed to take some homework over to my friend’s house,” he lies. There’s not really any homework; he wants to go to the skate park and see Michael. Probably he’s going to chicken out halfway there and turn around. He puts his biology textbook and his iPod in his messenger bag and takes it along, to make the lie seem plausible. It’s not far to the skate park - three songs on his iPod if he walks slowly - and rather than going straight in he hangs around by the fence awkwardly.

After a few minutes Michael notices him hovering uncomfortably by the fence and skates over to him. “Hey,” he says, rolling his board back and forth slowly with one foot. “What’s up?”

“Uh, nothing. Just really bored and tired of being at home.” Ashton shifts the strap of his bag on his shoulder. He doesn’t want to admit that he couldn’t stay away. It’s not like he was - hoping, or anything, at least not exactly - it’s not like he wants to hang out or laugh at Michael’s friends’ stupid jokes, or start wearing sweatbands with band logos on them. Now that they’re closer he can make out the writing on Michael’s arm, though by now it’s smudged slightly. It’s more band names for groups that he’s never heard of; he feels a rush of relief when he realizes, and immediately he feels really stupid for caring. He doesn’t say _‘Wanted to see you,’_ even though he had and he does.

Michael’s lips quirk upward into a not-quite-smile. “You should come more often,” he says softly. “Hang out with us.” Ashton hoists himself over the fence easily enough and - in a bizarre stroke of luck - lands feet-first for once. He can’t stop thinking about the fact that Michael thinks he has nice eyes, enough to say so online at the very least. They linger near the fence awkwardly; Ashton doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say.

He hooks his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans. He feels dumb borrowing his mum’s jeans, but they were the last clean ones in the hamper and it’s not that much of a stretch since they share tops all the time. “So you should definitely tell me some bands to check out,” Ashton says. He starts to put his iPod back in his bag. Michael takes his earbuds and coils them up carefully for him. It’s a nice gesture; he’s not sure how it makes him feel. “Oh, um, thanks.”

“You already know blink-182, right?” Michael asks, and beams when Ashton nods. “Cool. Well, uh, I really like New Found Glory right now and, like, Allister’s pretty good? There’s also Glassjaw but they’re kind of emo, I don’t know what kind of stuff you like…?”

“Mostly, like, 80’s bands and the classic punk bands,” Ashton admits.

“I could make, like, a mix CD for you with some bands if you want.”

“Yeah, that’d be cool,” he goes, hoping that his face at least doesn’t betray the stupid fluttery feeling in his chest. It’s not like it’s going to be a proper mix CD. They’re just friends sharing music; he needs to stop making it weird. They’re sitting with their backs against the fence, watching the rest of the punk kids skate. A mix CD, though. Ashton can’t believe he feels like this over the possibility of a burned CD with some weird music on it that he’s probably not going to like anyway and he’s going to read way too much into the lyrics of. It’s not like Michael means anything by it - he doesn’t, he can’t - so he’s going to act like it’s not a big deal.

“So a bunch of us are going to see the new _X-Men_ film this weekend if you’re not doing anything,” Michael says. He twists one of the many jelly bracelets on his wrist and bites his lower lip nervously. Ashton doesn’t know if this is, like, an asking as friends thing or a this is a date without being a date thing. He kind of hopes it’s the second, though. How very Seth Cohen of him.

He thinks over his schedule for the rest of the week. “Yeah, I don’t work, I could probably go.” Their bare arms brush; Ashton freezes up for a second but doesn’t move away.

“Great,” Michael says. They smile at each other - god, Ashton feels like an idiot - and he sits at the skate park until the sun starts setting and most of the punk kids wander off, presumably back to their own houses for primetime television and dinnertime. He doesn’t mind sitting out and watching them make fools of themselves as much as he’d thought he would. A couple of people had come over, mainly to talk to Michael - who’d introduced him around like it was this normal thing - and then after a few minutes gone back to whatever they were doing, and no one had treated him like he didn’t belong there. He’s starting to think he’d misjudged them all. Michael goes, “Hey, it’s getting kinda late.”

“Yeah. Walk me back?” Ashton asks. They walk toward his house slowly, neither of them saying much, but then Michael reaches out and holds onto Ashton’s pinky finger with his own. Suddenly he feels gawky and knock-kneed in a way he hasn’t since before he started high school. Michael walks him all the way up the driveway to his front door - and Ashton doesn’t miss his less than subtle glance at the empty driveway and open garage either. He doesn’t know what else to do, so he says, “Well, this is me.”

“Yeah, I know. Walked you home before, didn’t I?” They’re clearly both remembering what had happened the last time. Michael smirks, hovering just in arm’s reach. He’s still holding onto Ashton’s pinky. They meet somewhere in the middle. Ashton leans forward hesitantly, hoping he hadn’t misread the signals because he wants. He’s never wanted to kiss a boy before. Michael pulls him in by the hand and kisses him softly. He’s never been more glad for the broad, leafy acacia tree in the yard that obscures the view of the front door from the street. They stumble backward into the trellis with the climbing vine and Michael hums contentedly. Ashton grabs at his waist, makes an embarrassing noise in the back of his throat. God, he’d never known.

Michael pulls back and stares at him thoughtfully. “I should probably, um,” he says vaguely, sucking his bottom lip in between his teeth. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” Ashton nods mutely and watches him go, waiting until he’s out of sight before reaching down and adjusting the bulge in his jeans. That’s definitely something he needs to deal with later.

To be entirely honest Ashton had forgotten about the slip of paper in the pocket of his work pants by the time the new week rolled around. He worked the late shift again on Sunday and when he’d asked about becoming a part of the waitstaff permanently, his manager had said “I thought you’d never ask,” and changed his schedule for the next week so he’d have all mid-afternoon shifts to give him a chance to adjust to the change in duties. It’s Tuesday morning and when he wakes up Lauren’s already started the coffee maker and there’s a load of laundry in the machine. His sister’s kind of the best.

“What does ‘ubiquitous’ mean?” Harry asks over breakfast.

“It means you’re getting a thesaurus for your birthday,” Ashton tells him. He dumps another spoonful of sugar into his coffee and stirs it quickly, slopping little puddles of it onto the counter. Harry reaches for his mug when he sits down; Ashton swats his hand away and goes, “You’re not old enough for coffee; it’ll stunt your growth. Drink your milk.” Lauren looks at him over her own coffee, eyebrows drawn up. He doesn’t know what to make of the fact that she’s done chores on a weekday morning. They have half an hour, maybe, before everyone has to be dressed and ready to leave for school. Since the laundry machine is already spinning the excess water out of the clothes Ashton doesn’t complain when Lauren thrusts her makeup mirror at him and puts her eyeliner on at the kitchen table. She hasn’t inherited the curly hair genes from their father, at least, and that’s always something to be glad for. Ashton stopped straightening his hair sometime after high school; it was a lot of effort to impress people he didn’t care about, and anyway the tips of his ears are better off because of it.

The doorbell rings as he’s loading their dirty dishes into the dishwasher - a recent purchase he and his mum had gone in half-and-half on - and before he can get it, Lauren does. “Ash, door’s for you,” she calls from the front hallway. When he doesn’t immediately drop everything and go to her, she yells, “Ashton Fletcher, I’m serious! The door!” And he doesn’t appreciate being harangued with his middle name so early in the day. He finishes loading the washer and puts a squirt of dish liquid into the little hatch before he answers the door.

He doesn’t bother peering through the little eyehole. It’s probably a door-to-door salesman or something, this early, so he doesn’t care that he’s in his underwear and an oversized sweater stolen from the clean laundry pile. Until he does. “Your middle name is Fletcher, seriously…? Why didn’t you ever tell me that, that’s fuckin’… awesome.” Ashton rubs at his eyes with his fists, sure that he’s stuck in a bizarrely lifelike dream. But he can feel the rasp of the fabric against his skin and the sunlight on his face, which tells him that Michael standing on his doorstep in those same jeans from the restaurant and a leather jacket over his t-shirt is entirely real. “You didn’t call,” Michael says.

“Yeah, um,” Ashton says, rubbing the back of his neck. He’s self-conscious of the way his hair looks when he’s first woken up, his shitty excuse for pyjamas. He wonders if he can pull the sweater down over his exposed thighs without being obvious about it.

“So I didn’t know if you were, like, busy or just avoiding me,” Michael tells him. Ashton stares at his own bare feet and raises one shoulder in a defeated shrug. He had been busy, but the business had been secondary to the fact that he didn’t think getting involved with Michael - as a one-night stand, or whatever - was a good idea. Without looking back he knows that Lauren’s hovering by the coat closet pretending to be looking for something; behind his back he waves her off, though he doesn’t know how he’s going to explain this. He doesn’t lie to his siblings. “I wanted you to call,” Michael says quietly. “Every time my phone rang I wanted it to be you.” He’s leaning against the trellis, fingering one of the leaves on the climbing vines gently.

Ashton meets his gaze. “This isn’t a good time for me,” he admits. “I - Saturday was my first time waiting tables, I just got… Got roped into it and ended up liking it, I guess.”

“Like a promotion?”

He shakes his head ‘no’. “More like a mistake. I’m, what are you doing here?” It’s so early the sky still looks painted with pastels; the light plays off Michael’s pale, hasn’t seen sun in weeks skin, makes him look more innocent than Ashton’s willing to give him credit for. Not looking like that. He doesn’t - whatever, he’s not thinking about it. Instead he squares his shoulders, leans against the door frame to fill it up, almost marking his territory. Abandon hope, all ye who enter.

“Ash,” Michael says quietly. “I forgive you for what happened before. I get - it was a bad time, for both of us - I get that it’s always a bad time for you. Just… give me a chance, okay?” His eyes are steady, pleading. Ashton takes a step back, retreats into his comfort zone. “We’re playing a show tonight in the city,” Michael tells him. “I put you on the guest list. You should come if you can.”

He doesn’t miss Michael’s gaze raking over him one last time, hungrily, as he starts to close the front door. “I’ll think about it,” he says. There’s no time to think about it though - he’s got to pull himself together, get dressed, take Harry and Lauren to school - and in his heart he already knows he’s not going to go. He pulls on a pair of jeans and slips into his shoes, calls up the stairs to his siblings. “Time to get moving! Into the car,” and with that said he grabs his car keys from the front table and loops the keyring around his index finger. Harry stumbles downstairs with his hair still sticking up and his shirt on inside-out. He hustles his brother out to the car and starts the engine, which coughs and splutters before catching, and he reaches into the center console for his glasses and jams them on his face.

Lauren hops into the front seat a moment later and regards him cooly. “What was that about?” she asks, flicking away a strand of hair that had gotten stuck in her lip gloss.

“Don’t, Lo,” he replies. He winces when she turns the radio on and flips to the local rock station; Michael’s song is playing and try as he might, he can’t hide his reactions from her. Never has been able to, much to his detriment. What he really meant is don’t, while Harry’s in the car - he’s not out to his family, not quite - there’s never been time for him to have a love life or even a sex life, so until now it had been a non-issue. They don’t talk as they drop Harry off at the elementary; he gets out of the car and stands at the curb waving goodbye to them for a moment before he races off to join his friends, similarly messy-haired and bespectacled.

After they’ve pulled out of the parking lot Lauren shuts the music off and turns to face him, a serious expression on her face. “Ash,” she says. “I heard everything. I know you hate me eavesdropping; I wanted to make sure you were okay. Are you?” He doesn’t know how to answer that. He pulls off the road and into a Starbucks drive-thru and orders her favorite three-syllable frozen drink for her, and a grande Pike Place with three sugars for himself. They sit in the parking lot in companionable silence for a moment; at first he thinks she’s going to let it go, then he realizes she’s gathering her thoughts. “You’re not going to go, are you?”

He spreads his fingers out on the steering wheel. “I have to work,” he protests. “I can’t just - drop everything, drop all my responsibilities - I’m not going to mess everything up because of him.” The coffee’s hot on his tongue; he rolls it around in his mouth as penance for wanting what he knows he can’t have. He can’t afford to be reckless with his heart.

Lauren frowns at him, a crease appearing between her eyebrows. “One night isn’t going to mess everything up,” she tells him, running her fingers through her hair - a nervous habit she’d come by honestly, since he does the same thing - and then adds, as an afterthought, “What do you want?”

“I want something to be easy,” he sighs.

She squeezes his knee gently. “I’ve got babysitting this weekend. You’re calling out from work today; don’t argue, I heard what he said and you’re going.” Before he can put up a fight about it she’s already taken his cell phone from the console and punched in the number for the high school - when she presses it into his hand it’s already ringing and as the answering service picks up, she mouths ‘Tell them I’m sick. Flesh-eating virus,’ and glares at him pointedly. He mumbles an excuse into the speaker, gives his name and a contact number, and pinches his sister’s side grumpily.

“You can’t just,” he protests. Lauren stares him down - god, he’d forgotten how terrifying sixteen year olds could be - and he sighs, raises his hands in defeat. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” he says. He doesn’t think Lauren knows what she’s asking of him; he hangs his head and thinks, what’s the worst that could happen? He has self-restraint. He isn’t just going to give in and - and what, fuck Michael? - and anyway, he’s not a band slut, not some unfeeling piece of meat that’s waiting at his beck and call. They drive back home and rather than deal with the hole he’s dug for himself, he takes a long hot shower. When he’s done Lauren’s sitting cross-legged on his bed, going through all their clean laundry in a pile on top of his unmade sheets. “What are you doing?” he asks.

She holds a pair of jeans up and frowns at them critically. “Finding you something to wear,” she answers. She balls the ones she’s holding up and throws them at his chest; he catches them out of instinct and starts to fold them up before she says, “Try those on.”

He unfurls them and stares at them a moment before realizing, “These are yours.”

Lauren snaps her fingers and points at them. “You wear mum’s jeans all the time,” she points out. He turns his back and shimmies into them, working the tight fabric up his legs then, slowly, his thighs. He has to suck his stomach in to button them just below his hips and he’s just about to protest that they don’t fit, he can’t sit down, when Lauren smirks at him and goes, “Perfect, they fit,” and tosses a shirt at him. He tries on several different t-shirts before they find one at the bottom of the pile that’s so old it’s falling apart, and somehow that’s the one she decides works with the jeans. It’s one of his, an old Metallica tour shirt he inherited from their uncle, and it has so many holes it’s practically indecent.

Once he’s stripped out of the clothes and folded them up on his dresser neatly, he flops down on the bed beside her and asks, “Why are you doing this?” Lauren twists one of his curls around her finger idly, half-watching the shitty entertainment show she’d thrown on his television while he’d been in the shower.

“Because I know you want to,” she says simply, “And you won’t let yourself have anything unless someone else gives you permission. So I’m giving you permission.”

His mouth suddenly feels dry, the room too hot. “You don’t - You don’t understand, Lo.” He rolls over to hide his face in the pillows. Lauren’s fingers rake through his damp hair, comforting as he sobs into his pillow, chest heaving. He’s embarrassed, doesn’t know why he’s crying - it’s awful that he’s doing this - other than it’s a lot to take in. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to want; here Lauren is telling him that it’s okay if he does, and she doesn’t even understand, doesn’t even know the whole situation. When he’s done crying she’s rubbing his back in lazy circles, murmuring soft words the way their mum had used to do when he was little. Before… just, before.

He sits up and wipes his eyes, laughs a little when Lauren hands him a tissue. How the tables have turned on him… He hasn’t cried like that in - years, fuck, he hasn’t cried since… and he doesn’t want to think about it even now - and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say, only that he should apologize. “It’s okay,” Lauren tells him, stroking his hair. “I know.”

“You don’t know,” he whines, nudging his face into his sister’s side. “I’m… I’m gay, Lo,” and then he bursts into tears again, swiping at his eyes stubbornly and choking on his breaths the whole time. “Like, super gay.”

Her fingers still against his scalp. He tenses, waiting for the terse comment or whatever comes with the weight of his words, but after a second she resumes combing her fingers through his hair soothingly and says, “I know. I know what he meant to you,” but that’s impossible - she couldn’t have, how could she have known - she was eleven at the time. Some time later she gets up to bring his cell phone, and he calls out from work, his hoarse voice after crying lending plausibility to the excuse that he’s been sick. They watch all the shitty daytime talk shows in his bed, lying stretched out side by side. In the afternoon, while they make cheese toasties in the kitchen, she asks, “Did you love him?”

And he says, “Yeah,” and though tears prick at the corners of his eyes none fall, so that’s a start. Lauren’s only response is to hug him tight and, behind his back, move the frying pan off the burner and switch it off. He wonders when she got so goddamn mature; it seems like yesterday she was eleven and watching _Degrassi_. Now she’s practically an adult - it dawns on him that someday soon she’s not going to need him anymore and he starts to panic - and it’s just, where does he fit into anyone’s lives anymore? He reaches out to steady himself on the counter, misses his mark and puts his hand down on the hot burner. “Fuck,” he growls, shaking his hand as if the motion - not cold water, or anything - will take the sting out of it. It seems to him he’s been doing that his whole life - keeping moving to avoid the hurt when slowing down and thinking would probably help more.

“Mum won’t mind,” Lauren says.

He knows she’s not talking about playing hooky from school. “I know,” he sighs. “It just seems so - I don’t know, it’s complicated - Like, I don’t want him to think I’m a band slut or something, you know?” Talking about it, surprisingly, is making him feel somewhat better.

“Band sluts don’t get on the guest list,” Lauren tells him through a mouthful of her sandwich.

Fondly, he goes, “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” and smiles to himself. Once they’ve tidied up he lets Lauren drive to the grocery store so they can pick up milk and eggs; she stalls his car at the stoplight and swears about his stupid manual transmission and for once he doesn’t bitch at her about not swearing. He figures that he owes her that much at least. Somewhere between the dairy section and his bedroom door he starts having second thoughts about the whole thing. “This is a stupid idea,” he tells himself.

Lauren stands in his doorway while he gets dressed. “It’s not a stupid idea,” she argues, “You love him.”

“Loved,” he corrects her. “Meaning it’s in the past and I have no idea why I’m letting you talk me into this.”

Her eyebrows knit together in an incredibly accusatory way. “I was eleven, not stupid,” she says, and slugs him on the arm fondly. Once he’s fumbled with the button on his borrowed jeans and pulled on his shirt, Lauren smiles up at him and strides briskly across his bedroom to the closet and flings it open with no regard for his muttered insults and protests. Finally, she pulls out the denim jacket he’d gotten for Christmas the year before last and appraises it quickly. She goes, “Hmmm,” looks him up and down, and says, “I know what you’re missing. Stay here.”

And she flounces out of the room whistling a 5 Seconds of Summer song - he could kill her, honestly, and not feel sorry about it - to rummage around in their mother’s sewing basket, and when she comes back she’s got the jacket in one and the seam ripper in the other. “Oh, lord,” Ashton sighs.

“Are you ever going to wear this the way it is right now?” Lauren asks, brandishing the seam ripper at him gleefully. He shrugs - he hasn’t worn it in ages, had forgotten he owned it - and only winces a little when she starts ripping out the seams at the sleeve. It’s not a very skillful job; when she’s done it’s turned into a vest, which he has to admit does look better than it had as a jacket, and as soon as he’s pulled it on he can see where the inspiration had come from. It ties the outfit together nicely, makes it look more like something he’d just thrown on last-minute rather than he’d spent all day agonizing over what to wear.

The final touch is added when Lauren makes him wet his hair and she works some fruit-smelling stuff through his damp curls, massaging it in until his hair is dry and it looks… Well, it looks a lot better than it normally does - not styled, exactly, but not so all over the place - and for once he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks he looks okay. “I should,” he says, checking the time on his phone. “Thanks for this.”

Lauren hugs him tight one last time and tells him, “You deserve to be happy, Ash,” and then she shoos him out the front door, promising up and down that she’ll pick Harry up from the elementary school in an hour and emphatically tells him that if he’s home before midnight she’ll be disappointed in him. His car coughs miserably when he starts it up and he grimaces thinking about how it’ll protest if he puts it on the highway, then decides it looks better if he turns up late anyway. Fashionably late, they call it. God, he hopes it doesn’t come off like he’s trying too hard. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to be trying at all.

For the rest of the week Ashton tries not to think about what had happened. Aside from a few sidelong glances in the halls between classes, he’s actually too busy to make time to talk to Michael; the mix CD appears in his locker sometime on Thursday and he’s not sure how, but he smiles when he sees it and shoves it in the zipper pocket of his messenger bag, to listen to when he gets home. No one should be as happy as he is over a burned CD in a crappy paper sleeve - but Michael’s written out the track listing on the back with all his favorite lines in brackets, doodled all over the empty space - and Ashton has to count down the minutes until the school day ends so he can race home and listen to it before he has to leave for work. He’s just gotten his history paper back and he can’t bear to look at it, the big blocky C- in red at the top of the page, so the thought of Michael and his stupid mix CD helps to brighten his mood.

It’s his mum’s day to collect Lauren and Harry; he’s got work early, at four, so he just has time to kick off his jeans in the corner of his room and grab his Walkman - collecting dust under some papers on his tiny desk - before he has to dash out the front door and jog to the bus stop, nearly tripping over his own feet as he boards it and flashes the driver his monthly bus pass. Once he’s found a seat at the back, he pops the CD in and turns the volume up half-expecting the Walkman to give out on him. The music starts flooding through his earbuds a moment later. He tips his head back and closes his eyes, listening to the unfamiliar songs and picking out favorite lyrics of his own, wondering with each new track what Michael was thinking when he chose them. The songs leave a big, dopey smile on his face for the rest of the evening. Since it’s Thursday - restock day, a ton of go-backs to be put away before he puts new product on the shelves - he’s allowed to keep his earbuds in while he works.

He has to buy a new set of batteries for the Walkman on his break; he pops the used-up ones out and throws them away before replacing them, and he leaves the extra two from the pack in the pocket of his stock boy vest. They close every night at eight p.m. - he’s got his earbuds in so he misses the announcement over the speakers, keeps right on working until the manager flicks the lights once, twice, three times and comes by to check up on him - and he’s startled when a hand lands on his shoulder and his boss asks him, “Everything okay with you, pal?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m great,” he says sheepishly. “This guy I know, um, he made me a mix CD and I got kind of into it.” He ducks his head, wishing desperately that there were somewhere he could hang up his stupid smile and flushed cheeks, put them on the back shelf for a minute so he could be less obvious and embarrassing.

His manager makes a complicated face and, finally, squeezes his shoulder and tells him, “Tell this guy he should keep making you mixtapes if it gets you to work that hard, then.” Ashton doesn’t know what to make of that; he feels like the world’s got a bit insane, everyone smiling at him all the time. He listens to the CD again on the bus ride home and gets off a stop early, at the corner instead of in front of his own house. It’s a stupid idea - it’s a really, really stupid idea - but he does it anyway, shucks off his vest and stuffs it in his bag since the plain white t-shirt he wears to work looks better without. He walks past the skate park, half-expecting to find that there’s no one there, it’s so late into the evening. But then Michael’s there - not skating or anything, just sitting at the edge of the bowl with his board, looking pensive - and Ashton pulls one of his earbuds out and crosses the distance quickly.

“Hey,” he says.

Michael looks up at him and says “Hey back,” motioning that Ashton should sit down beside him. “I can’t figure out how to do a frontside,” he complains, stretching out his left leg to show Ashton the huge gash on his shin. “I keep falling.” When he sits down Ashton’s legs dangle over the edge of the bowl, casting shadows down the curve of the concrete under the glare of the big streetlamp. Their knees knock together as they’re sitting.

“Maybe you should try something else for a while,” Ashton suggests. “Like, work on another trick or something and maybe your brain’ll get unstuck from the funk it’s in.”

“Huh,” Michael says. He rests his hand on Ashton’s knee and doesn’t take it away when Ashton notices, which is… something. “You just get finished with work?”

“Yeah. Um. So I got your mix CD,” Ashton tells him lamely. “I, um, I really liked it. It was… cool.” And god, he’s so lame. He wants to sink into the concrete, disappear, anything to be less embarrassing than he feels currently. Instead of disappearing, though, he puts his hand on top of Michael’s and leaves it there. Neither of them pull their hands away . After a minute Michael looks down at their hands and carefully turns his over so they’re palm-to-palm.

“Well,” he says. “Cool. Thanks. Are we still, um, the movies Saturday?”

Ashton nods silently, staring at their hands not quite holding each other. It’s a good metaphor. He stores it away, he doesn’t know for what - a rainy day, perhaps - and they sit in silence together for a long while. “What’s a frontside,” he asks finally, for lack of anything else to say. Michael explains it badly - he uses a lot of hand motions and incomprehensible noises - until he sort of understands that it’s a type of complicated nosegrind, that the problem is how he keeps pitching forward instead of balancing. “I think you need to put more weight on your front leg,” he says when Michael demonstrates it for him, stumbling forward at the top of the lip and barely catching himself with his arms out to stop himself kissing the concrete. “Shouldn’t it be acting as a counterbalance?”

“Maybe, yeah,” Michael says, and once he’s retrieved his board he tries it again, this time managing to balance on the lip of the bowl before he drops back in, coming to a stop just in front of Ashton where he stands in the center of it. It feels a little like standing in the center of the universe - and he supposes too that this is the center of Michael’s universe anyway, the skate park. In the center of the universe is where Michael takes a step forward and kisses him confidently, one cool hand on his cheek, the other on his hip, pulling him closer. He makes an embarrassingly needy sound in the back of his throat and leans into it, rubbing his hands over Michael’s upper arms and coming to rest atop his shoulders. They cling to each other as they kiss clumsy and open-mouthed, with hands ghosting over exposed bits of skin uncertainly.

A car alarm starts blaring in the distance, startling them both and causing them to jump apart. “Wow, um,” Ashton says, touching at his mouth absently.

“Walk you home?” Michael offers with hope evident in his voice.

“Yeah,” Ashton says. There’s a lump in his throat - maybe the things he should be saying - and he swallows past it when Michael links their hands together, like that’s something normal and expected between them. It doesn’t take them nearly long enough to make it to his house; his mum’s car is there, so they stand awkwardly at the end of the driveway, Michael glancing at the porch light uneasily. Ashton looks at it too, considering. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. Then - before he can start to regret it - he wraps his arms around Michael’s waist, holding tight for a minute and hesitantly nuzzling his face into the other boy’s shoulder. He stands there after they’ve parted, watching Michael go as he skates in the direction of his own home.

It’s only after he’s showered, once he’s looking at his reflection in the fogged-up bathroom mirror, that he realizes his mouth is red and kiss-swollen. Between that and his cheeks still pink from the shower he’s almost sure his mother can tell what’s happened when he traipses downstairs to warm his dinner in the microwave. If she does know, she doesn’t say anything. She looks tired and small as she sorts through their mail at the kitchen table under the light from just the stovetop. They’re conserving energy, keeping the lights off as much as possible so when the summer heat sinks in they’ll have the extra to cover the added expense of air conditioning. He tells her about the movies, and Saturday, says he’ll pay for it himself.

“Is this a date?” she asks, the first real smile in months playing on her lips.

“Sort of,” Ashton admits. “I hope so.” He stammers in surprise when his mother fishes a crisp bill out of her wallet and hands it to him, makes him promise to have the car back by midnight or there’ll be hell to pay. “Mum, don’t -” he starts.

“Enjoy yourself,” she tells him. She shoos him off to bed not long after; it doesn’t take a lot to realize that she doesn’t want him to see her worrying about the bills, still tries to shield him from it like he does his younger siblings. He already knows where she keeps them anyway - hiding it from him doesn’t stop him looking or worrying about it. And anyway he always sneaks an envelope full of the extra cash she needs into the bottom of the drawer before their bills are due. Twenty dollars won’t break them.

He tries not to worry about it too much on Friday. When he has a free moment on the computer before school, he rips the CD onto the hard drive and puts it into his iPod and feels stupid and cheesy the whole time he’s waiting for it to finish transferring. Lauren’s in the kitchen trying to convince Harry to finish his cereal. “One more bite,” she pleads, jabbing the spoon at his closed mouth helplessly. Ashton groans internally and leaves his iPod connected to the computer to help her out.

“Come on, big guy,” he says, taking the spoon from Lauren. “You’ve gotta eat your cornflakes or you’ll turn into a total girl like Lo.” Harry looks between them wide-eyed and, with an expression of horror, opens his mouth wide and allows Ashton to shovel the cereal into his waiting maw efficiently. Three year old logic is flawed at best. Once the cereal’s all finished and the bowl left in the sink, he makes sure that the two little ones both have their bag lunches in their backpacks. Their mum’s got the car today so Ashton walks them both; he kisses Harry goodbye when they drop him off at the preschool, and then he and Lauren walk over to the elementary sharing his earbuds so she can bop along with the music. “You like this stuff?” he asks when he clicks ‘Next’ and one of the songs Michael had picked for him starts up.

“I guess,” Lauren replies, wiggling along to the music joyfully.

They reach the corner where Ashton usually trades her off to the school crossing guard. “Don’t forget mum’s picking you guys up,” he reminds her, rubbing his knuckles over her hair affectionately. As always, she makes an annoyed face and untangles her hair where he’s ruffled it. Her pale blonde hair ripples in the wind when the breeze picks up. He stands at the corner and watches to make sure she’s made it across the street safely before turning in the direction of his own school to walk the rest of the way alone. It doesn’t feel like a Friday. The sky’s too optimistic. Or maybe it’s just him - maybe he’s the one changing with the weather, walking along the edge of the sidewalk all the way to the high school. There’s still a little time before the first bell when he arrives, so he sits on the edge of one of the picnic tables in the quad and watches the punk kids as they horse around.

From what he can tell they’re playing a game of H.O.R.S.E.; after another round Michael flips them all off and stalks over to sit beside him. “I got totally skunked,” he moans, pressing his face into Ashton’s shoulder briefly.

“Next time,” Ashton promises him, tapping the backs of his fingers against Michael’s knuckles affectionately. That’s all he’s brave enough to do in the daylight where everyone can see them. Michael straightens, his arm curving around behind Ashton’s back. They’re not quite touching - if either of them moved, maybe a quarter of an inch both ways, they could - and it speaks to what both of them know that neither of them lean into the touch. He thinks to mention what his mum had said, what she didn’t say, and goes, “Mum said I can take the car tomorrow, if you want.”

“Cool.” Michael knocks their knees together playfully, daring him to retaliate. Without thinking Ashton reaches out - swats at his knee, knobby and pale in the morning light - and in that moment Michael links their fingers together, tucking both their hands between their thighs atop the picnic table. They’re so hyperaware of each other’s presence that he doesn’t know how the world hasn’t caught fire around them. No one pays them any mind. Soon after, the bell sounds. Ashton’s reluctant to take his hand away, warm as it had been while it was fit together with Michael’s. “Later,” Michael says, letting go of his hand with a little sigh. For a brief second his eyes flick down to Ashton’s lips.

Ashton touches at his mouth warily, thinking of the kiss he wants and can’t yet have. “Yeah, later.” Saves it for the back of the darkened movie theater, hoping he’ll be brave enough not to fuck it up.

The rest of the day marches on without his say-so, ticking along until suddenly it’s time to go home and he realizes he hasn’t seen Michael all day. When he passes through the quad on his way out there’s no one there - no one grinding on the railing or doing nosestalls on the planters - so he assumes they skipped afternoon classes. It bothers him how much it bothers him that he didn’t get asked to go along. He’s got work to go to - it would’ve been pointless to go anyway - but he still bristles with the idea that no one had wanted him there. He holds the bad thoughts close to his chest during his shift. It’s easier to let them go one by one - like lead balloons - with his earbuds in, still listening to Michael’s mix for him as he faces packages of instant pudding. ‘I Think You’re Wonderful’ is his favorite for utterly stupid teenage declaration of romance-type reasons.

To his credit, he finishes his work five minutes before the manager flickers the lights. His mum’s sitting in the parking lot waiting for him - he always gets picked up on Friday nights - and he slides into the front seat gratefully, stripping out of his vest and stuffing it into his bag. “How was school?” his mum asks.

“Fine,” Ashton tells her.

She frowns at him and goes, “No, how was it really?” One of the things he hates about his mum is that she’s got a built-in bullshit detector when it comes to him. He can’t lie to her about anything.

“A bunch of my,” he sighs, “Well, they’re not my friends really but, like - this person I like? - Anyway, they all skipped this afternoon together and no one asked me to go.” His mum glares at him for that, so he adds, hastily, “Like, I know skipping class is wrong, but it would’ve been nice to be included.”

“Maybe your friend realized you wouldn’t want to go because you had work and if you had gone, your mum would have skinned you alive,” she tells him, the threat clear from her tone. He shrinks down in his seat. She can’t be too mad at him, however, because she takes him through the drive-thru at the McDonald’s on the way home and lets him order whatever he wants. Ashton wolfs down the burger and fries hungrily. He hadn’t realized how loudly his stomach had been growling before. They pass by the skate park too quickly for him to tell if anyone’s there. For a second he thinks about asking to be let out there but he can’t quite figure out how to explain it without the whole thing tumbling out - Michael and the kissing and the not-date - so he clamps his mouth shut.

The house is still when they get in. Lauren’s on the computer, playing her mindless Neopets games and Harry’s long asleep. After a shower, Ashton decides it’s best to cut his losses and get some well-deserved sleep rather than agonize over Michael’s Myspace profile for hours. He opts instead to turn on the television in his room and flip it over to Fuse TV, studying the videos they play for some kind of clue into Michael’s psyche or something. The only thing he manages to surmise in the time it takes him to fall asleep is that a disturbingly large proportion of bands are filming their videos in emptied-out swimming pools. He has to wonder if there’s a surplus of abandoned pools out there somewhere, or if they all use the same one and just dress it up to look like it’s in different locations. When he looks it up in the morning he learns more than he’d ever wanted to know about the foreclosure rates on homes in the greater Los Angeles area; that’s where they get the empty pools, anyway.

True to form, in the morning his mum has left him the car keys and carpooled to work. Harry’s already up and fed - Lauren’s plonked him in front of the Saturday morning cartoons - and the dishes are drying in their rack on the counter. There’s nothing for him to do. He pours himself a bowl of cereal and sits with Lauren on the couch, watches as she paints her toenails a horrifyingly bright pink with a practiced hand. “You missed a spot,” he tells her, just to be a shit.

She gasps and stretches her foot out, staring at her toenails, before she realizes and punches him in the side. “You’re a jerk,” she hisses.

“That’s what older brothers are for,” Ashton laughs.

Once she’s forgiven him, Lauren leans into his side so they can watch _Pokemon: Advanced_ together. He likes Saturday mornings with his siblings best - which is why for the last two years he’s stoically refused to work the Saturday morning stockroom shifts. They switch to ABC for _That’s So Raven_ at the end of the episode, Lauren’s choice, and he plays the brick game on his iPod while the show plays in the background. He manages to waste the entire morning on cartoons and cereal, and finishes the last of the orange juice straight out of the carton. Lauren wrinkles her nose at this, says “Gross,” in her snottiest voice, and then asks him to make her a cheese toastie.

“You could learn to make these yourself,” Ashton tells her, but really he doesn’t mind. Harry helps by un-peeling the plastic wrappers from the processed cheese slices and laying them carefully on a plate for him. It has to be processed cheese slices to make it a proper cheese toastie, because real cheese is too expensive and - more importantly - it doesn’t melt right. He makes them two sandwiches apiece toasted to perfection and then cuts them - quarters for Harry, halves for him and Lauren - so they can eat lunch together at the table.

In the afternoon he reads picture books with Harry until the three year old tires of them, wrapping both of his small fists in Ashton’s shirt, and demands to be carried upstairs for a nap. He scoops his brother up, wriggling legs and all, and carries him up the stairs. “You’re getting heavy, man. I’m going to need to negotiate a raise soon if I’m gonna keep carrying you like this,” Ashton tells Harry.

Harry lets out a yawn and asks, “What’s a raise?”

“It’s when people give you more stuff when you do something for them,” Ashton says. Harry nods his head like ‘oh, okay’ and waits impatiently to be tucked into his little bed. Carefully, Ashton pulls the cartoon character-printed sheet over top of him and tucks the edges of it under the mattress snugly. “Right, there you go, pal. I’ll see you when you wake up.”

With both of the kids looked after - Lauren’s off to some friend’s house for a sleepover the rest of the weekend shortly - Ashton has nothing but free time to kill until the evening. For a while he plays DOOM on the computer; he wants to refamiliarize himself with the franchise before the new game is released at the start of next year. He thinks about the practicality of becoming a space marine for a while sprawled out on the couch after, having burned himself out on killing demons. By the time he allows himself to check the time again - having resorted to covering the display on their VCR with a Post-It note lest he drive himself crazy - it’s almost time for the babysitter to arrive. He’s wasted the whole day away doing nothing, feels vaguely guilty about it, but the babysitter arrives right on time so he can get ready for his…

Well, it’s not a date. He borrows another pair of his mum’s jeans - and the last clean pair to boot - from the clean laundry pile, vowing to put on a load of laundry when he gets in later. He puts on a clean shirt and applies deodorant just in case, runs the straighteners through his fringe one last time. It occurs to him vaguely that people probably think he’s a weirdo for wearing girl jeans, but it also occurs to him that he doesn’t really care because they fit. Once he’s certain that Harry and the babysitter will be fine on their own he leaves for the theater, giving him extra time in case he needs to sit in the car by himself and feel awkward in the parking lot. He doesn’t, though.

The bouncer - a huge guy as wide as two of Ashton, easily - doesn’t give him a hassle about getting into the show when he says that he’s on the guest list. All he does is look at Ashton’s license, nod, and mumble something into his radio. “Someone will come down to escort you,” he says in his deep gravelly voice. He stands there with his muscular arms crossed over his chest, leering out at the line of teenage girls wearing neon-bright hoodies over their band t-shirts and cheap vinyl bracelets from Hot Topic or Claire’s or wherever. A few minutes later a harassed-looking intern from the radio station comes down with a laminated badge for him; he clips it onto the lanyard for his keys so he doesn’t lose it. He gets increasingly nervous about seeing Michael again as the intern leads him through a maze of interconnected hallways behind the general admission area. What if he’s totally wrong about everything? What if it is some, like, some band slut thing and Michael’s just looking for a quick lay before the show?

His nerves dissolve as they round a corner and come upon Michael talking to one of the bands on tour with them - One Direction or No Direction or something - and Michael stops in the middle of a sentence to stare at him wide-eyed before going, “Um, shit, can we talk later? I’ve gotta,” gestures at Ashton and stands there running his hands over his hair nervously. “You came,” he says, bouncing up on his toes when Ashton finally reaches him.

“I did,” Ashton says.

Michael starts to reach out for him - an aborted version of what they used to have - but pulls back at the last moment. “So… This is my job, pretty much,” he explains. “There’s never anything to do between sound check and our set time, so I figured…” He throws his arms out uncertainly, then shoves them in his pockets.

“Figured what?”

“I don’t know. I - I just wanted to see you again. Apologize, I guess. Tell you I’m not over you? I really don’t,” he says, biting his lip anxiously. “I just needed to see you.”

Ashton doesn’t know, then, what the appropriate reaction is. Never has known, to Michael, how he’s supposed to react on any given day. Today he’s somewhere between throwing himself at Michael, shitty baggage and disorganized life and everything, and turning on his heel and leaving and never looking back. First he says, “You’re not the one that needs to apologize,” thinking first of all the things he’d said and done, that last day they’d seen each other, and then, “This isn’t some weird hook-up thing, right?”

Michael laughs and hauls him into a hug by the front of his shirt, tells him, “I forgave you a long time ago.” Ashton finds that he’s reluctant to let go - he wants to stay there in the circle of Michael’s arms as long as he can, forgiven or redeemed or… Well, there’s something hopeful in his chest and it grows with every passing second. It’s difficult to hug Michael back without his fingers grazing bare skin, which he thinks is maybe the point. He forgets to breathe when Michael’s chin hooks over his shoulder and he goes, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Ashton tells him, hitching one arm up higher to curve around his shoulder blade. It’s a weird, slow melancholy sort of reunion - there are things passing between them unsaid that need to be, he can’t quite figure out if he wants to say ‘I love you’ or ‘Fuck you’ - and when they tear apart from each other one of Michael’s tour-mates is gawking at them from an open doorway. When he notices Ashton looking he waves and goes back to texting on his shitty little Sidekick 3. Last year’s eye candy, Ashton thinks. He’s trying very carefully not to think about the ‘I’m not over you’ that had been said; he thought that he was over it, over Michael - and then this. There’s just… this, out of nowhere.

He stands side-stage with Michael while the first band plays - they’re really not very good - and he doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to, expected to, if he’s allowed to do anything here. The question is answered for him during the third song of the set, when Michael reaches out for his hand. Whether it’s out of habit he doesn’t know - it’s so familiar to him, them holding hands - and he chews the inside of his cheek while he thinks, his thumb stroking over Michael’s the whole time. The backstage area is a mess of cables taped down to the floor, racks of guitars and amps and various other things. He keeps having to check where his feet are, make sure he’s not standing on something important. When Michael catches him worrying about it he laughs and tells Ashton, “Stop looking for things to worry about. This is supposed to be fun.”

“For you, maybe,” Ashton tells him. The music is loud; they have to talk right next to each other’s ear to be heard, and even then it’s a bit more like shouting. He tries not to think about the proximity of Michael’s mouth to his skin and fails. By the end of the set he’s leaning into the touch, feeling too hot and needy and confused about his feelings.

Once the screaming dies down, Michael says, “I really wish you would’ve called me. We’re flying back to L.A. tomorrow morning to start writing for the new album.”

And Ashton goes, “Oh.” He doesn’t want to admit that he’s disappointed, but the feeling rushes over him anyway, cold and prickly and dissatisfied. Michael lets go of his hand. The disappointment must show on his face - a moment later he feels Michael’s arm wrap around his waist, fingertips resting barely above his hip.

“Maybe you can fly down and hang out for a few days?”

“I - Um, yeah. That’d be cool.” He stops himself from arguing, saying he’ll have to work - he always has to work, that’s never going to change - and tries to accept everything that’s happening at face value. It’s not the same as things were in high school. And even now, as much as Michael tries to put up a front with his whole punk aesthetic, Ashton knows that they have too much history for a one-night stand to ever be enough for either of them. He’s willing to put everything that happened behind him.

“Cool, then.” During the next opener - No Direction, they’re called - they stand together until Michael gets called away to do warm-ups with his band. Luke and Calum both welcome him with open arms; they hug him and tell him ‘Good to see you’ and ‘How’ve you been, man?’ and it’s obvious that they’re doing it for Michael’s sake, but Ashton appreciates the effort all the same. It’s a sure sign that things have changed. They hadn’t - in high school, Luke had been a weird, shy kid who weighed all of ninety pounds soaking wet and Calum had been going through a faux-gangster phase - in high school they hadn’t interacted much. He watches them get ready for their set. They’ve got two or three techs running around plugging things in and setting up the in-ear microphones. Ashton’s surprised to see Michael tuning his own guitars, checking them over carefully before setting them back in the rack.

In the seconds before the lights go down onstage, Michael goes back to him for a second and says, “Wish me luck.”

“Break a leg or whatever,” Ashton says. “The traditional don’t-fuck-up mantra.”

“Yep,” Michael agrees. The first notes of the intro music start playing and Ashton can see the crowd surge forward, simultaneously letting out an ear-splitting cheer. Calum and Luke race onstage, silhouetted by the single blue light, and the crowd gets even louder. And then - right before he races onstage after his band - Michael slides his arms around Ashton’s waist and kisses him full on the lips, grinning as he steps out of the wing to uproarious screaming and launches right into the first song of their set.

Finally, Ashton understands why Michael was so insistent he come to the show. Watching him onstage doing what he loves is incredible. It’s such a huge stride from the pimply teenager with a bad fringe that had played house parties and schlepped his instruments around in the back of a station wagon. And the fact that there are thousands of people screaming the words back - it’s astonishing and suddenly Ashton wishes he’d been there for all of it. Just as he’s wondering how they can possibly keep their energy up running around the stage, jumping around with their instruments and somehow managing not to break a sweat, one of the guitar techs brings an acoustic out to the stage. Luke and Calum step into the wings for a minute. Under regular lighting Ashton can see that they both have a sheen of sweat all over.

“Hey, you having a good time?” Calum asks him, throwing one sweaty arm over his shoulder as he guzzles down an entire bottle of water in one go. “Christ, those lights are hot.”

Ashton nods. Calum and Luke stand with him and watch as Michael grabs the acoustic guitar - which Ashton recognizes as the same one he’d had when they were seventeen - and talks to the crowd for a minute, fumbling with the tuning pegs quickly. “Holy shit, you guys are loud tonight,” he says, which garners another cheer from the crowd. “I think you guys might be the craziest crowd we’ve seen on this tour. Anyway. I thought we should slow things down for a minute, catch our breath, have a nice little moment together… So everyone here knows we have a song called ‘The Only Reason’ on our last EP - merch is at the back, pick up a copy if you haven’t got it already -” and he pauses for a minute, laughs nervously, and adds, “I wrote this song about someone really important to me. I hope you like it.” It’s just him and the guitar for the first verse; Ashton can see that he is nervous, screws up on a couple of the chords as he starts.

The crowd explodes again when the chorus hits - Calum and Luke run back onstage to pick up the tempo - and Ashton hadn’t known. He hadn’t known Michael still felt that way. From behind him, someone says, “Don’t suppose you know what that’s all about, then. I’m Louis by the way,” and that’s how he becomes acquainted with one-third of No Direction. Louis squints at him suspiciously when he turns around, looks him up and down critically, and finally nods in a way that seems like approval.

“Did he really,” Ashton stammers.

“That was a declaration of love if I’ve ever seen one, mate,” Louis confirms. Well, shit. He doesn’t know what to do with that. ‘Wherever You Are’ being the next song on the setlist - and Louis makes a point of telling him so when it hasn’t been on their set any other day of tour - cements the declaration. Ashton has to wonder just how many songs they’ve written are about him. He’s not exactly the type of guy you’d expect someone to write songs about in the first place. Michael has always been weirdly sentimental underneath his armor of dyed hair and piercings; it had been one of the things Ashton liked about him most, until one day it wasn’t anymore. Now is not the time to pick apart old wounds for the sake of being bitter.

The lights go down at the end of ‘Long Way Home’ and the band comes offstage for a minute to catch their breath and down as much water as they possibly can before the encore. “So,” Michael says once he’s mopped the sweat from his brow with a towel that someone handed to him. “What’d you think?” They’re standing close together but not quite within arms’ reach - he’s still holding his guitar, checking the tuning - and as much as they both clearly want, there are still two songs left in the setlist.

“I think you still have an encore to play.” Ashton grins at him before he has to dart back out and play two more songs. Since it’s the last night of tour there are tour pranks to be had - during ‘She Looks So Perfect’ Louis and his band race onstage in their underwear and do an outrageous dance that involves a lot of hip-thrusting - and Michael laughs into the microphone and gives Zayn a playful shove when he starts grinding up against his ass. Ashton blows them both a kiss; he knows they’re playing it up for the crowd and besides, it is kind of funny to see the way the fans scream even louder every time it happens. When the lights go down for the last time Louis and Zayn race past him, cackling,

Luke launches himself at Ashton at full speed and licks the side of his face, prompting Calum to go, “You little fuck!” and look at Ashton apologetically. “Sorry about him,” he says, “He likes to try and make me jealous.”

“Wait, you guys are -”

Michael snatches the hat off Luke’s head and goes, “You have your own boyfriend, asshole.” Privately Ashton thinks that the hat looks better on Michael anyway, though he might be biased. Luke and Calum look at each other and disappear off without a word. “Wanna come to the afterparty with me?”

“What, like a date?” Ashton asks. Michael nods frantically and reaches out for his hand. “Yeah, I guess I could go on a date with you.”

They help with the load-out - Ashton’s mostly useless and holds cables while the techs roll them up carefully - and then once the trailer’s packed Michael huddles with Luke and Calum for a moment. Some conversation passes between them and then the other two pile into the van with their tour manager. “Figured you wouldn’t want to ride in our van - it smells like ass,” Michael says when he returns.

“You’re just trying to get me alone so you can have your wicked way with me,” Ashton points out.

“I have a reputation to uphold!” he protests, pausing as they walk through the parking garage to take pictures with a group of girls and summons up a marker from somewhere to sign CDs with. In every picture he makes the most ridiculous faces or sticks out his tongue. And then when they do get into Ashton’s car the first thing Michael does - though they haven’t been in a car together in almost five years - is dig through the center console for his iPod and the aux cord to put music on. Predictably, he finds the only Green Day album on it and a few seconds later the opening chords to ‘Burnout’ start up. “You know,” Michael says, “The entire time I’ve known you this is the only Green Day album you’ve ever liked and I just don’t know if I can date someone who doesn’t like ‘American Idiot’.”

Ashton rolls his eyes and puts the turn signal on. “Lucky for you that I like you enough to not kick you out of my car for that comment.” He follows Michael’s directions to the hotel. They park in the visitor lot - he’s not planning on staying late, despite what Lauren had said - and they hold hands on the way to the elevator in the hotel lobby. A few of the guys are in the bar trying to pick up girls; Michael laughs and shakes his head, muttering under his breath about how girls are smarter than they think. The band’s staying in a fairly low-budget hotel so the elevator takes forever to reach the ground floor.

“Fuck, finally,” Michael complains, jabbing at the ‘Close Doors’ button fruitlessly as an elderly couple enter the elevator alongside them. He’s still sweaty from the show as he wraps himself around Ashton, smelling of body odor and hair products. The old couple get off on the third floor; as soon as they’re alone in the elevator Michael seems to relax, slumping forward to mouth at the skin below Ashton’s ear. He’s handsy when they’re on their own - that part, at least, is nothing new - but this whole thing, girls screaming his name and wanting him to sign their skin… There’s no certainty, is the thing that’s making Ashton nervous. He has no guarantee that Michael’s not just going to go away again. The elevator doors open with a shuddering noise when they arrive at the top floor.

It’s not much of a party - not much more than they were in high school anyway - just someone’s laptop hooked up to the speakers with their music library on shuffle. Ashton stays close to Michael’s side as he greets everyone in the room with a wave or a handshake, making sure to introduce Ashton around to anyone he hasn’t already met. Once the introductions and cursory small talk have been made, most people break off into their own smaller groups to stand around talking. There’s a cooler full of beer and several different alcohol bottles to choose from on a table. He takes a beer from the cooler and opens it but doesn’t drink any of it, not yet. It’s insurance in case the night goes badly. In the adjoining suite there’s a set of sliding glass doors leading out to the balcony. That’s where they end up after making the rounds once more; Louis and Zayn are sharing a joint between them, blowing smoke over the edge.

Ashton half-expects Michael to join them, surprised when he doesn’t. Instead he waves them inside and says, “Can you guys give us a minute out here?” Louis nods and hauls his partner in crime off - Zayn protesting the whole time - and winks at them. Once the door has slid shut Michael runs his hands over his hair and groans. “Jesus, I thought we’d never get to be alone.”

“What’s so important you couldn’t tell me in front of your fifty best friends?” Ashton wonders out loud.

Michael clears his throat and looks away. “Would’ve been pretty embarrassing if I’d asked you out in front of everyone and you said no,” he says finally. Ashton’s heart is a traitor - it flutters in his chest at that. He runs his fingers over Michael’s tattoos appraisingly, rolling the words over in his head. It would be so easy for him to say yes. But from Michael’s expression the question is clear, even with the nonchalant way he’d phrased it. He knows he can’t say yes. Not with the band flying out in the morning, being gone for god knows how long writing and then recording for months.

Ashton intends to say no; however, his mouth has other plans. “I can’t,” he starts to say, twisting his fingers around Michael’s. “I can’t just jump into this with you leaving in the morning and me having to go back to my normal life. I know that’s not the answer you want to hear, but like…” For the first few seconds he feels fraught with anxiety. He’s waiting for Michael’s expression to fall, for the too-big feeling in his chest to burst and burn out into nothing.

Instead Michael’s laughing and pulling him into a tight hug. “I get it,” he says, picking at a frayed thread where Ashton’s sleeves used to be. “I’m not asking you to decide tonight. Just think about it, okay? I want to be with you and that’s enough for me right now.” Which is not exactly the reaction he was picturing in his head when he’d said it - although Ashton had kind of fucked it up for himself by not being blunt in his delivery - since he’d been expecting Michael to shout or storm back inside, not calmly accept his choice and hold him close.

“Okay,” Ashton says, burying his face in Michael’s neck to drink in as much of him as possible before the night is over. “Okay, alright, we can… We can do this, for now.” It can be enough for him too. He thinks about late night phone calls, maybe flying to the States for a week or two, and it could be enough. They’re different now - he’s grown up some, for sure - but it’s really Michael who’s changed the most between them. Michael holds him carefully as they look over the city from the top floor of the hotel. Everything’s different, and still so much the same.

The sun’s just setting when Ashton gets to the movie theater. He parks at the back of the lot - more time to turn around and pretend he hadn’t wanted to come if he changes his mind - and takes his time getting out of the car. After a few minutes spent staring at his hands on the steering wheel, he kills the engine and climbs out of the car. It’s not like it’s a real date, he tells himself, so if it goes badly or he’s completely misread the signs there’s no reason to get upset. With that in mind he makes himself walk down the rows of parked cars, hands buried in his pockets. He hears them before he sees them - Calum shouting “Mikey, you dick!” - on the steps leading up to the main doors. Suddenly he’s relieved that they’re not going to be alone. It’s weird enough seeing Michael’s friends without their skateboards; he thinks if they were actually alone together he might come apart.

“You came,” Michael says, brimming with excitement.

Ashton tries to hide his smile, but it feels like he’s failing miserably. “Of course I did,” he replies. “I promised you, didn’t I?”

“I got, um, I bought your ticket for you,” Michael tells him. And, oh. Maybe this is a date after all; when they all file into the movie theater they take up the top row, Michael purposely dragging Ashton along after him so they can sit in the middle. The others are all roughhousing, joking around - Ashton’s pretty sure there are running jokes that he’s missed entirely - but Michael sits beside him quietly, fidgeting until the lights go down and the coming attractions start up. Halfway through a trailer for the Harry Potter film coming out he feels Michael’s hand on his knee, trembling slightly. Ashton reaches out for him in the dark, locking their fingers together as the opening credits to the movie come on. He feels like the textbook definition of an awkward teen trying to cop a feel in the back of a movie theater.

For the most part he tries to watch the film, hyperaware that they’re holding hands the entire time. Once he’s sure that everyone around them is engrossed in the plot of X2 Ashton leans into Michael a bit. Michael, for his part, takes the hint and moves his arm so it’s around Ashton’s shoulders, angling their bodies closer together over the hard plastic armrest between them. Ashton wishes the armrest weren’t there - he wants to know what it is to be completely curled against Michael - but it is. He contents himself playing with the zipper on Michael’s hoodie instead. They touch each other cautiously, like something might break. Everything else is still happening around them - Calum and some of their other friends laughing and throwing popcorn like the assholes they are - but for a few minutes it feels like time’s stopped completely.

The film transitions into its second act and Michael’s arm is still there, resting atop his shoulders and shifting every so often. Not like he’s bored - more like he’s anxious, doesn’t know what to do with his body. Ashton realizes that his chances are slipping away one by one; the film will end eventually and then he’ll be out of excuses to be near Michael like this. It takes a few minutes for him to muster up the nerve to do what he wants to. When he does it - leans over the armrest carefully and presses his lips to Michael’s - the kiss is returned hungrily, with Michael’s free hand at the back of his neck holding him in. It’s different to kiss him in the back of the theater with so many people near; he has to swallow the little pleased noises in the back of his throat, not wanting to get caught making out in such a public place. He likes the feeling of Michael’s arms around him.

Far too soon the house lights in the theater come on - as soon as they’ve both realized they spring apart - and Michael stares at him for a long moment, giggles and goes, “Um, wow.”

Calum looks at them both suspiciously. “Didn’t know you were so into comic book movies,” he says.

“I’m, uh. I’m really into comic books right now,” Michael replies, raising one eyebrow in a way that implies a double meaning which Calum seems to pick up on. So Calum’s definitely seen them, then, but Ashton’s relieved when he doesn’t press the issue any further. “Anyway - Ash, didn’t you say something about pizza…?” He hadn’t, actually, but he can take a hint so he nods slowly. They walk side by side out of the theater and down the rows of cars. Predictably, as soon as they’re in the car Michael starts pawing through Ashton’s CDs and moans, “Nothing you have in here is from this century,” when all he finds are the Eagles’ greatest hits album and lots of Queen.

Ashton sighs and pulls his iPod out of the center console along with the cord to connect it to the stereo. “Here, plug this in then,” he says. “Where are we going?”

“Wherever,” says Michael, flicking through the music on Ashton’s iPod still. He’s got his feet up on the dashboard, too - Ashton grits his teeth and tries not to think of how his mum will kill him. Michael puts on Green Day’s ‘Dookie’ album and stares at him, a very serious expression on his face. “I didn’t know you liked Green Day,” Michael tells him. Apparently this has changed something between them; Michael lays his hand on Ashton’s knee as he drives, still flicking through the iPod’s contents. Eventually they end up at the beach. It’s cold but not chilly, so by some silent agreement they get out of the car and stare at the ocean for a few minutes.

“I’ve never been here at night before,” Ashton comments.

“Me either. Let’s walk a bit,” Michael suggests with a nervous laugh.

The waves crash against the shore relentlessly. Since it’s after dark the only light is from the moon and a lone lamppost at the end of the parking lot. Ashton’s starting to feel nervous again; it’s common knowledge that this is where all the kids with cars go when they want to hook up. His heart beats along with the waves against the sand. Michael slips out of his checkered Vans and carries them in one hand, prompting Ashton to follow suit - he balls his socks up and puts them inside the toes of his shoes - and they walk together down to the water. When they reach the shore he has to bend and roll his jeans up to avoid them getting wet. He can feel Michael’s eyes on him; when he straightens up to his full height again Michael reaches for his hand.

Neither of them complain about the cold water rushing around their feet and ankles - though Ashton does hear Michael’s gasp as the water licks around his feet the first time - and they walk until Ashton’s almost lost sight of that single lamppost marking where he’d parked. “Should we head back?” he asks.

“In a minute. It’s nice out here,” Michael says. Rather than walking back, he flops down on the ground, pulling Ashton along with him. The sand clings to their wet feet and legs. They drop their shoes in the sand, too, one of Ashton’s tipping over on its side. In the quiet dark it’s easy for him to rest his hand on Michael’s calf and brush the sand from it before leaning forward to kiss him slowly. He notices the way Michael’s heels dig into the sand, the sound he makes as they lie back on the sand wrapped around each other. After a few minutes they pull apart, both gasping for air. Michael looks at him curiously and holds his hand while he stares out at the ocean.

“Tonight was good,” Ashton decides. “I had a good time. With you, I mean.”

Michael’s lips land messily on the corner of his mouth. One of his hands slides up under the hem of Ashton’s shirt to rest just above the waist of his jeans. The touch is gentle; it’s the intention behind it that makes Ashton feel like he’s falling out of his skin. “We should get back,” Michael says. Their second trip across the sand is a little quicker - Michael bitches about the sand between his toes a dozen times - and the whole way Ashton thinks about how he wouldn’t mind if this became a permanent thing. He goes to start the engine until Michael’s hand curls around his and Michael goes, “Wait, just…” and kisses him again, curling both hands in his shirt to pull him in. Ashton’s knee presses against the gearshift painfully - he doesn’t quite mind but he knows it will bruise - and Michael swallows the tiny, pleased noises he can’t stop from making.

Kissing is kind of the best thing he’s ever experienced - better than all the made for TV specials led him to believe, anyway - and between the kissing and Michael’s hands all over him, it’s not long before Ashton’s embarrassingly hard in his jeans. He doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to acknowledge it. The air in his lungs is suddenly secondary to the taste of Michael’s mouth - he wants more - until he accidentally leans on the car horn, startling them both. “Fuck,” he hisses, jerking his elbow away from the steering wheel quickly. “Sorry,” he says sheepishly.

Then he realizes Michael’s staring at him, how he must look with his shirt rucked up nearly to his armpits. He starts to pull it down - to preserve whatever fledgling modesty he’s got left - and Michael reaches for him, hands grazing over his sides wonderingly. “Don’t,” he says, tugging at Ashton’s shirtfront until he cooperates and lifts his arm for it to be pulled completely off. They resume exactly where they had left off - only this time Michael’s hands pet at his bare skin and he’s hyperaware of it, his skin feeling superheated and like he needs relief before he loses it completely and comes in his jeans. And they aren’t even his jeans anyway, borrowed from the clean laundry pile. He pushes at the sleeves of Michael’s hoodie until it comes off, too, and then at his ripped t-shirt after.

The kissing quickly turns to groping each other in the front seat of Ashton’s mum’s car. Of course it would make more sense to move into the backseat - all they’d have to do is climb over the center console - but Ashton doesn’t want to stop even that long. He’s sort of scared that if he lets it stop Michael will realize that this is a mistake, that he doesn’t… want to, or something. Michael’s arms are steady around him though, one hand tangled in his hair and the other rubbing at his chest. The sound he makes when Michael’s hand slips down to his thigh must be awful; Michael laughs softly against his mouth and the sound of it vibrates along Ashton’s skin pleasantly. He’s working up the courage to take it a step farther when there’s a knock at the drivers’ side window. “Jesus christ,” Ashton huffs, rolling down the window slowly while Michael pulls his hoodie back on, zipping it up halfway.

Neither of them had noticed the cop car pulling up beside them. God, they’ve fogged the windows up. “Everything okay in there?” the officer asks, shining a flashlight over both of them. Michael squints against the bright light and grips Ashton’s hand tightly.

“Yeah,” Ashton answers once he’s caught his breath. “Yeah, we’re fine, just heading home. Sorry,” and then he rolls the window back up. He leans back in the seat and stares up at the rearview mirror as the cop drives away, Michael laughing softly beside him. Despite everything that’s happened he’s still rocking an erection in his mum’s jeans. It’ll just have to wait for home, he thinks, home and a long shower before he puts a load of laundry on.

“I didn’t think that happened in real life,” Michael says finally. “Holy shit.” He pulls Ashton in for another kiss - more chaste this time - before he reaches for the iPod again and puts Radiohead on for the drive home. And if he notices that they’re taking the long way home he doesn’t say anything, other than to shift his hand on Ashton’s leg and squeeze his thigh. They pull into Michael’s driveway with the headlights turned off. Ashton doesn’t know how they’re supposed to say goodbye now - Michael hovers in the passenger seat awkwardly, balls his hands up then relaxes them, and then darts forward to kiss Ashton quick before hopping out of the car.

Ashton sits in his own driveway for a long time, the engine shut off, before his legs feel steady enough to walk inside. It’s 11:54 when he fits his key in the lock; his mum’s sitting up in the living room watching David Letterman. “Hi, hon,” she says, giving him a thin, worried smile. “How was it?” He thinks guiltily of the sand rubbed into her floor mats and shrugs. It’s lucky that the dark hides some of how debauched he must look - he can feel that his hair’s messed up from Michael’s fingers in it, his mouth feels five different kinds of swollen - so after he’s toed his shoes off and lined them up carefully he says good night and lies awake on top of the covers. He takes a while getting to what needs to be done, wondering if touching himself to the thought of what might have happened is going to make things weird.

He does anyway, palming himself through the thin fabric of his boxer shorts until the friction gets to be too much and he has to shove his hand inside to find any relief at all. The whole time he’s thinking of Michael’s hands on his skin, over his shoulders and chest, over his thighs. He works himself over slowly, biting the inside of his cheek the whole time to stop from making too much noise. He doesn’t exactly relish the idea of his mum hearing and coming in to check that he’s okay.

It’s nearing one in the morning when the cordless phone rings. He’d thought it was downstairs sitting in its charger, but he answers it anyway to avoid waking his mum. “Hello?” he mumbles into the phone, trying not to sound annoyed. When no one answers he says “Hello,” again, a little louder this time. He doesn’t take his hand out of his boxers, but stills his hand and wonders what kind of pervert calls someone’s house so late at night.

“Ash?” Michael’s voice comes through the phone line breathless and uncertain. “Hi.” And Ashton thinks he hears a sigh - or maybe a moan, but that’s wishful thinking on his part - and he lies there with his hand still, thinking of what to say back.

“Um, what’s up,” he says.

“Nothing, I just,” Michael says. Ashton can hear the whoosh of his breath as he exhales, almost like he’s nervous, and then - barely perceptible in the background - he can hear the sound of skin on skin, maybe a little slick. “Just wanted to talk to you for a bit. I forgot to say - uh, shit - forgot to say I had a really good time tonight.” Michael makes another sound, this tiny ‘oh’ that comes from the back of his throat.

He turns his face away from the phone for a second and moans into his pillow as he resumes stroking himself, a little slower this time. “Good,” he says, barely above a whisper. “That’s, um, that’s good. Right?” He tries to picture Michael alone in his room, jerking off on the phone to him. There are probably a billion band posters on his walls - and that’s weird, isn’t it? Having glassy-eyed posters watching, watching him as he…? He wonders if Michael’s naked. He asks, “Are you, are you, um…”

“Yeah, um, I’m,” Michael goes, and then there’s a choked-off moan that sends fireworks shooting all the way through to Ashton’s toes. They both laugh nervously. And Michael clears his throat a little, asks, “Are you?”

Between the sound of his voice - a little rough and on edge - and everything else that night, Ashton has some difficulty forming words just then. “Yeah,” he says. He feels as though he’s failed at his initial goal of not moaning down the phone. When he does accidentally Michael makes an appreciative noise and the sounds on the other end of the line pick up. Ashton squeezes his eyes shut, trying to picture it. He kind of wants to know what Michael’s skin would taste like.

“Should’ve stayed over,” Michael says some time later. He hasn’t - neither of them, yet - he hasn’t come yet, Ashton thinks, and the sounds he makes are getting needier as time passes. Ashton’s agreement is implied by the way he breathes out after, long and slow because he’s getting closer, edging himself along and then stopping completely. “Next time,” Michael tells him, followed by a soft whine. Ashton brings his hand up and licks his palm, wishing the whole time that it was Michael’s hands on him instead of his own. They don’t speak after that, not until Michael comes, whimpering out a soft ‘Fuck, fuck, Ash’ before he goes quiet.

Ashton follows suit quickly enough - he comes with a shuddering “Oh shit” into the phone, toes curling as the world falls apart around him, white starbursts behind his eyelids - and then once he’s remembered to breathe he goes, “Wow. Um, shit.”

“Go out with me again,” Michael says. He sounds sleepy now - his voice is heavy with it, slurring off his consonants and making Ashton wish he were there too, to be curled up against him - and in the background now there’s a show playing, one of the late night ones. “You can stay over next time,” Michael yawns.

Ashton rolls over and reaches for the box of tissues on the nightstand. He does his best to clean up after himself, all over his stomach and hand and the sheets - fuck, the sheets - and he says, “Yeah, yeah, I will next time.” They say their goodbyes awkwardly, kind of not at all. Afterward it’s all damage control; he has to strip the sheets off his bed and balls them up in a heap, carries them downstairs and shoves them into the washing machine even though it’s two in the morning. He puts the borrowed jeans in too, the laundry soap after them. While the washer is filling up with hot water and soap he gets the cordless phone and puts it back in its cradle. Ashton ends up staying awake until sunrise - he has to put the washing in the dryer afterward, has to push his hip against one side of the dryer so it doesn’t thump and wake everyone up - so he does homework until the dryer buzzes and he can fold the sheets and pretend nothing had happened. The thing is, he’s not so good at playing pretend.

The next few days pass in a blur of hours spent waiting tables and doing assignments for his online classes until the wee hours of the morning. Ashton feels positively buried under his workload - somehow on top of finishing college he’s gotten himself talked into doing a management training course at the restaurant - so there’s no time for anything else. He and Michael had said their goodbyes in the parking lot of the hotel, right outside his car. When he has a few seconds to catch his breath he remembers how Michael had held onto him extra tight and kissed him sweetly until someone had honked at them from the road. If his tables chide him for forgetting their goddamn ranch dip cups or that it was supposed to be a diet, not regular, he thinks about Michael right next to his ear, mumbling “We’ll see each other soon, I promise, as soon as I can get you here,” and it levels him out until he can do what needs to be done. Lauren hadn’t asked how things had gone - she’d been awake when he got home, swearing at the printer as it chewed up page after page of her philosophy essay - and he hadn’t said.

Neither of them actually remark upon it until the start of the new week. He’s just finishing his shift when she brings Harry from the elementary school, a grim look on her face. As soon as he’s done hugging them both hello, she presses a glossy magazine into his hands and asks, “Have you seen this?”

He turns it over in his hands and looks at the cover. In large print across the top the headline reads ‘HARRY STYLES GAY SEX SCANDAL’ and there’s a photo of Michael with international teen pop sensation Harry Styles leaving some restaurant. Their arms are around each other’s waists and Michael’s got his chin tipped defiantly toward the camera, his free arm flung out flipping off the paparazzo. Ashton feels sick looking at it; he turns away and leans on the bar to steady himself as he flips through the magazine to the cover story. There are more pictures - Michael and Harry with their heads ducked together, talking closely; Harry hovering close by while the band poses for a photo with some fans; their matching jerseys at an L.A. Lakers game - and they could be nothing. The article is scathing, implying that Michael’s somehow taking advantage by virtue of being older than Harry Styles, that he’s got a reputation as a bad boy.

“Are you kidding me?” Ashton sighs, running his hands through his hair. It hasn’t even been a week. It hasn’t even been a week since he agreed to - well, to whatever they are - and he wonders why he’d ever thought he could trust Michael again. Lauren has other magazines too, with more pictures of them together. Some of them she’s drawn devil horns or a unibrow on Harry in. It’s a charitable act, given that just the week before she’d had a poster of Harry on her wall - some stupid publicity shot from before he’d gotten voted off X Factor - and Ashton’s glad his sister can be loyal even if his not-boyfriend can’t manage to be.

He lets Lauren drive home, his nerves too frayed to focus on the busy roads. “It could be nothing,” she tells him. “You’ve always said that magazines lie all the time.”

“What if it’s not a lie?” he groans, crumpling the pages of Hello! magazine between his hands. At the next stoplight Lauren hands him a pen out of her bag. Drawing on the pictures of Harry Styles makes him feel a little bit better. The nagging feeling of meanness comes after, settling around his shoulders heavy like a sweater. He doesn’t actually know for sure that Michael’s - well, it’s not cheating, they’re not properly together - that Michael’s seeing someone else. Certainly their conversation hadn’t made him think, anyway.

From the backseat, the youngest of the three siblings pipes up and says, “Everyone knows those stories are fake. Give me one, I want to draw on people’s faces too.” And Ashton dutifully hands back a copy of People and another pen so Harry can add in his own horns and mustaches. Lauren takes them through the McDonald’s drive-thru and buys both of her brothers fries out of her babysitting money. She gets a large Coke for the three of them to share, too, laughing when Ashton protests that it’s going to rot their teeth. When the magazines get thrown on the coffee table in the living room later, Ashton notices that Harry hasn’t drawn on any of the halves of the pictures with Michael in them, only the people around him.

He tries to put it out of his mind for the rest of the evening. Surprisingly he gets through a fair bit of his workload before he starts thinking about it again, in the small hours of the night. The only reason he thinks of it at all is his phone ringing, the sound jarring in the stillness of the house at night. He has to scrabble for it in his pockets. “Hello,” he says, slightly out of breath from his mad dash across the house. He hadn’t looked at the display to see who was calling him. A moment later he wishes he had.

“Ash,” Michael says over the static and crackling. There’s an ocean between them; there’s bound to be tons of noise on the line, then. “Ash, hey, I’m sorry I haven’t called before now,” he says. Ashton thinks that he sounds kind of tired.

“Hey,” he says back, kicking over an open water bottle as he sits down at the computer desk. “Shit. Um… How are things?”

There’s silence, so much silence that for a moment he thinks the call’s been dropped, and then Michael tells him, “Apparently I’m in the middle of a sex scandal, so things have been better. I just - it’s not true, you know that, right? I’m not… I’m not sleeping with Harry Styles, Ash. You have to know that.” And Ashton wants so badly to believe that it’s true. He just wishes there was some way to be sure without the assurance of Michael’s touch, of having him right there to promise. “I wouldn’t do that to you,” Michael says in a small voice.

What choice does he really have but to believe it? “I know,” Ashton sighs. “I know, but like - You have to understand that it was kind of a shock. Like. Lauren showed me the headlines earlier today. And I don’t know if I’m supposed to believe any of it or if I’m supposed to, like, be defending you or if I’m supposed to be pissed that it’s not me, or whatever.” He lets out a shaky breath and braces his arms against the flat surface of the desk, head in his hands.

“Do you trust me?”

Ashton feels incredibly shitty that he has to think about it at all. “Yeah,” he says after a few minutes’ worth of silence, thinking of the expense of Michael calling him overseas at all. If it were true he wouldn’t have called at all. “I trust you.”

On the other side of the ocean Michael lets out a relieved sigh. Ashton hadn’t realized that he was holding his breath, too, until he exhales unsteadily. “I feel like I’m going crazy,” Michael admits. “Harry’s not, like - He’s a cool guy and all, you know? I didn’t expect,” he sighs. “I didn’t expect to get put in the spotlight like that. And he’s got this stupid crush on one of my friends so I’ve been there for him a bit.” Ashton doesn’t ask who - he doesn’t want to know anything about it, doesn’t want to give himself in to the paranoia that’s building in his thoughts. If the rumors are true he doesn’t want to know who Harry Styles’s bedfellows are.

“I don’t know what to think,” Ashton says.

“Yeah. I’ve missed you though,” Michael tells him. “So there’s that. It’s the middle of the night there, isn’t it? Shit, it is. Um. Sorry if I woke you up or anything - it’s just, it’s been a crazy day and I really needed to hear your voice.” That’s something new - Michael’s never needed him before. Ashton cradles the phone between his ear and shoulder awkwardly as he saves the assignment he’s half-finished with, shuts the computer down. “I need you here with me. I don’t want to do this by myself.”

“I know. Um, my semester break’s coming up,” he offers.

“I could fly you down,” Michael suggests. Ashton does the math in his head - two weeks until classes end - and wonders if he can get the time off work on such short notice. He thinks of how long the flight would be; sixteen hours, he’s Googled it. There would be two days nearly lost from his break just for the flights and then hours more from jet lag. He thinks about sleeping in a hotel bed somewhere next to Michael. The latter possibility wins out in his head.

He says, “Yeah. I want to come, I miss you too.” His unmade bed looks appealing; he kicks out of his work pants - which he hadn’t bothered to change out of - and crawls under the sheets. They’re cool and a little scratchy against his bare legs.

“You going to bed?” Michael wants to know. Ashton can almost picture him standing on a balcony somewhere, tired and a little drunk, leaning against the railing and talking on the phone to him. The thought of it makes him smile.

“Want to talk to you first,” he answers through a jaw-splitting yawn. “If I talk to you while I fall asleep it’s almost like you’re here. Tell me about your week.”

“Ummm, they’ve had label people out to bitch at us about our ‘vision for the album’ or whatever. That was pretty boring, actually, and then Harry’s in town doing promo before they announce his comeback album. He keeps talking about us writing a song together for it. I don’t think his label would like that very much,” Michael laughs. “We haven’t really had much of a break from tour before now, so Luke and Cal have been out a lot. It’s mostly just been me warding off the media by myself after they papped me coming out of that restaurant with Harry. I’m sorry I haven’t called more - it’s been so busy and then I haven’t known if you’d be at work or something.”

Ashton snuggles down under the covers a little further before answering. “I’ve been at work a lot, yeah,” he sighs, trailing his fingers over the edge of his duvet. “Had a lovely conference with my brother’s principal because kids are shitty and keep bullying him and she tried to tell me it’s because he’s too weird, it’s our fault. Got talked into doing a course at work, too, and I keep thinking how I want to get away from it all but I’ve got no time to.” Michael asks him what the course is for and he sighs again. “Um, my boss wants to train me up to a shift manager,” he says.

“Lot of responsibility, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I just want,” Ashton says. “I kind of just want a break from everything for a bit. Like, I’ve been thinking about saying ‘no’ to this promotion and then I think I must be crazy. Mum would smack me if she found out I said no to more money. Is it awful that I want someone else to take care of everything?”

Michael tells him, “You’re allowed to say ‘no’ if you don’t want to do it. Like. If it’s too much - you coming out here and all - we can put it off until later.”

And that is absolutely the only thing that Ashton’s certain of right now. “No, no,” he protests. “I want to come, I want to see you. Book the flights and everything so I have something to take me through exams.” Michael laughs at him and then, in the background, he hears a door open and close and Michael talking to someone else for a moment. They talk about stupid things for a while - a song he heard on the radio or the best pizza toppings - and Ashton starts to feel warm and sleepy with Michael’s voice in his ear. “What would you do if you were here right now?” he asks.

“Tell you to go to bed,” Michael says. “I’d give you a bit of a cuddle after I cleaned my teeth and tell you that you work too hard. And I’d put my cold feet on you under the covers.” The thought warms his heart; he’d been expecting the answer to take a different turn than it had. Michael keeps surprising him with things like that. Michael chuckles to himself like he’s told a great joke and adds, “You’re like the only person who actually believes in me.”

“‘ve always believed in you,” Ashton tells him sleepily.

“I know. Um, so I’ve got your flight booked for two weeks from now, before you go and fall asleep on me.”

And all he can do is grunt and twist himself up in the covers and protest, “Not falling asleep,” though the words sound heavy and slurred even to him. “I’m not,” he protests again when Michael laughs at him. His eyelids are feeling a bit heavy as he lies there listening to Michael talk about the songs he’s writing. It would be nice to have him here, Ashton thinks, and feel the rumble of his chest as he talks about it.

“See, you are falling asleep on me,” Michael says some time later. Ashton tries to protest again, to Michael’s infinite amusement. “Go to bed, Ash. You sound like you need sleep more than I do. Love you,” he says quietly, and then there’s a click as the line disconnects. Once Ashton’s heart rate slows he thinks that he would have said it back this time. He looks at the call log and sees that they’ve been talking for nearly two hours - no wonder it feels like he can barely keep his eyes open now. Sleep descends on him quickly. In the morning when he first wakes up he has to pinch himself to make sure it’s real. All he succeeds in doing is bruising the soft underside of his arm.

The house is already alive with motion when he drags himself out of bed. The coffeepot’s half empty and there’s a mug waiting for him on the counter. Harry’s sat at the kitchen table drawing in more of the magazines solemnly. “Your friend’s band sucks,” he says. Ashton can see the poster of the band he’s pulled out of the centerfold of one of Lauren’s teen magazines; he’s doodled all over it and given Calum an impressively bushy beard.

Normally he’d scold his little brother for being rude. Today he sighs, takes a long sip of his coffee and says, “I’d like to see you do better. Punk.”

Harry sticks his tongue out. “I’m going to become an author,” he mutters. “I’m going to write about real things instead of lame songs about underwear.”

And there’s no defending that song, so Ashton’s officially been bested by a nine year old. He sits down across from his brother to finish his coffee and flip through another magazine. This one hasn’t been defaced yet; he skims an article comparing the relative benefits of dating each of the Jonas brothers and takes a quiz to tell him which one he’d be the perfect match for before deciding that he’d rather have none of them. He stares at a makeup tutorial until Lauren comes downstairs fully dressed and whisks it away from him and pours more coffee into his mug. Back to real life, then. Once he’s finished the second cup of coffee he drives his siblings to school. There’s still an entire page of the management training book he needs to get done before noon. He has so much to do.

It’s all he can do to grit his teeth and keep his head down when the hostesses talk about Michael and Harry Styles. “I didn’t know he swung that way,” one of them titters. The other one tosses her hair and goes, “You’d think he would pick someone better-looking,” and Ashton has to walk all the way to the back and roll silverware in tight, flat cylinders until he stops wanting to punch something. He remembers suddenly why he never used to pay attention to idle gossip. The frustrated feelings stay with him, though, and all afternoon he has to keep reminding himself to paste a smile on until his cheeks ache. Two weeks has never seemed so long. He’ll have to start counting down the days until he leaves or he might implode with unrequited frustration.

The next few weeks of the school year pass by without incident. Ashton’s pretty bogged down with assignments on top of work and looking after his siblings, so he doesn’t get a chance to spend time with Michael outside of school. He’s been unofficially accepted into the punk clique, though - there’s always one or two of them that sit near him in class now. None of them seem to mind him being around, which is nice. Michael always sits with him at lunch, even if it’s just to steal one of his earbuds while he’s working on homework or to lean against him while he’s reading his novel for English class. Ashton doesn’t really mind it as much as he lets on sometimes.

“Stop changing the song every thirty seconds,” he complains one day when Michael’s commandeered his iPod. “Pick one and leave it there.”

Michael rolls his eyes and continues scrolling through Ashton’s music, finally queueing up ‘And Out Come The Wolves’ as a sort-of apology to him. “You haven’t updated your record collection since the early nineties,” Michael says. “What am I supposed to do with you? This is tragic.” He rests his hand on Ashton’s forearm for a moment before pulling away awkwardly. He’s full of little touches like that - it’s clear that neither of them know what to do with it - and it catches Ashton off-guard every time. Today he rests his hand on Ashton’s knee under the table and drums with his other hand on the tabletop anxiously.

If anyone sitting at their table notices, they don’t say anything. Ashton slips his hand under the table a moment later to link their hands together. His fingertips brush against the dozen or so bracelets on Michael’s wrist as he threads his fingers between Michael’s carefully. One of these days he’s going to remember to look up what all the different colors mean; people sometimes make vulgar jokes about them and it would be good to understand what they’re laughing about when Michael slinks away sheepishly or hovers near him looking uncomfortable. “Dudes in eyeliner making noise isn’t the same thing as making real music,” Ashton points out.

“What’s the point of being in a band if you don’t look good? No one will buy your records otherwise,” Michael protests.

Calum interjects from across the table with, “Dude, blink-182 don’t wear eyeliner. What’s your argument there?” and they fall into the kind of argument only best friends can have without screaming at each other. They bicker back and forth for a few minutes about it with Calum soundly shutting down each of Michael’s points - for a guy with a fake gold chain around his neck and a basketball jersey on, he can hold his own in a debate - until Michael whines in frustration. And Calum goes, “See, even Ashton can’t defend your honor because he knows I’m right.”

Michael scowls at his best friend, cheeks quickly turning bright red. “I don’t need Ash to defend my honor,” he protests.

“Good, ‘cause you’re digging yourself a pretty deep hole here,” Ashton teases him, bumping their knees together playfully.

“All I’m saying is to make it in the music industry right now you have to be pretty good-looking,” Michael says defensively. “Also, fuck you, Calum, I would totally have sex with Tom Delonge if he asked.” He squeezes Ashton’s hand under the table then and busies himself with the iPod again, scrolling through the list of albums until he finds the one and only blink-182 album Ashton has in his library. The CD had been a gift from his uncle, set aside and forgotten for a couple of months while he’d been busy with his life. Ashton had only rediscovered it the other day while he’d been cleaning his room. He’d immediately put it in the CD tray of the computer and ripped it to his music library because he knew it would make Michael happy that he’s making an effort.

Michael grins at him. “What,” he says, feigning ignorance.

“You,” Michael says, shaking his head as if in disbelief. He keeps hold of Ashton’s hand as they walk back inside after their lunch period ends; there’s a pep rally or something that afternoon and classes are cancelled. They stop by Ashton’s locker briefly - he needs his sweater and his mum’s car keys - and make their way to the student parking lot, both looking over their shoulders the whole way to make sure they haven’t been caught skipping. It’s not as big a deal if they skip the stupid pep rally anyway; Michael had made a case for it every day for a week straight, slowly wearing down Ashton’s patience with his rants about the preppy kids and how neither of them wanted to be there.

So, they’re in his mum’s car about to skip the pep rally. Michael turns the stereo up as soon as they’re out of the school parking lot. It’s sunny outside and Michael shouts the lyrics to ‘Down’ out the window to passersby on the street. “Where are we going, exactly?” Ashton asks.

“To the arcade,” Michael tells him, producing a bag of quarters from one of his many pockets.

“You are such a nerd,” Ashton says fondly. Michael swats at his arm half-heartedly for that comment, laughing as they pull up to the aging video arcade and find a parking spot. There aren’t many people there; the handful of people inside either work there or are skipping class for the afternoon, same as they are. It’s been a long time since Ashton’s set foot in the arcade - it hasn’t changed much since he was there for someone’s eighth birthday party - but the bright flashing lights on the games are familiar to him.

He stands with one arm around Michael’s waist as they feed quarters into the Galaga machine, laughing as Michael curses out the enemy ships every time one of their tractor beams hits him. “Motherfucker,” he growls as the GAME OVER screen flashes at him.

“Let me try. I’ll be so horrible it’ll soothe your wounded ego.” Ashton feeds his own quarters into the machine and rests his hands on the controls. It’s harder than it looks, though, mashing the button and jerking the joystick in the right direction - and isn’t that a wonderful metaphor for sex if there ever was one - so it takes him several minutes to catch on. Just when he thinks he’s figured it out, Michael’s arms slide around his waist. “You’re distracting,” Ashton tells him pointedly. It’s harder to concentrate with the warmth from Michael’s chest pressed up against his back.

“Yeah, but I’m a helpful distraction,” Michael hums, mouth pressed against the back of Ashton’s neck hotly. One of Ashton’s pixelated fighter jets goes down. It has nothing to do with the insistence of the warm mouth against his skin or Michael’s hands sliding over the length of his arms. Soon the GAME OVER screen appears in front of him; Michael laughs and pulls him away from the game to the row of pinball machines on the other side of the arcade. At the end of the row of nearly identical machines there’s a photo booth. Ashton doesn’t understand until Michael’s pulled him inside and thrown the curtain shut. It’s a shitty curtain, too - it only goes halfway down, leaving their legs on display for whoever should walk by.

He starts to ask, “What -” and Michael cuts him off with a kiss. There’s his answer, then. He kisses back, leaning into it as much as he can in the small confines of the booth. The little stool where people sit to take pictures digs into the backs of his knees painfully. The sound of a group of rebellious twelve year olds shoving each other around snaps him back to reality. It takes actual effort on his part not to poke his head out and tell them to shut the fuck up. “Fuck,” he groans, pushing his face into the curve of Michael’s neck.

“Come on, sit,” Michael says, feeding three dollars into the bill slot. Ashton lets himself be pulled down onto the rickety little bench and tries not to squint the first time the camera flash goes off. Before the second flash Michael slings an arm around him, squashing their faces together. The third flash goes off while he’s leaning in, and they both miss the fourth shot completely, too wrapped up in kissing each other to notice the flash. Outside the booth Michael grabs for the strip of photos before Ashton can get it - he folds it carefully and tears the strip in half and gives Ashton the bottom half, the third and fourth frames. Ashton looks at them before he tucks them inside his wallet for safekeeping. He’s secretly kind of pleased he got the last two, the ones of them kissing.

Michael drags him over to the pinball machines and feeds quarters into the Theater of Magic. A booming voice says ‘Welcome to the Theater of Magic’ and deeply ominous organ music starts up as Michael pulls the knob back to release the first ball. “I suppose you’re going to tell me there’s a trick to this, huh,” Ashton teases him, watching as he slaps the flipper buttons on either side frantically.

“There are guys who organize fuckin’, like, tournaments for this. Can you believe that?” Michael says. “And there is a trick to it - don’t suck.” The lights and sounds of the game are totally disorienting; it seems like they’re standing there for two or three minutes and when Ashton checks his watch, more than an hour’s gone by. He got distracted listening to Michael talk about all the old arcade games, watching his face light up as he reached the top score. And admittedly, he’d found it sort of hot when Michael had started nudging the machine with his hip trying to cheat. He’d gotten thinking about what else Michael’s hips would be good at in an embarrassed sort of way. Michael catches him watching and smirks. “You see something you like?”

Ashton can feel himself blushing deeply. “Maybe,” he admits in the smallest voice possible.

“Only maybe?”

“I, um,” he stammers. “I do. Like you. In case… there was any confusion about that.” And Michael just grins smugly at that, like he’s won a big prize with Ashton’s confession or something. It’s like he doesn’t care who sees them together, who knows that they hold hands under tables and kiss sometimes. Although Ashton could do with more kissing - he’s just not ready to deal with the prejudice that goes along with being open about the whatever between them - he’s content with this for now.

Michael can be infuriating at times, though. Like right now, when he grabs for Ashton’s hand and goes, “I kind of already knew that,” all smug again. He adds, “This isn’t an after-school special or whatever. I just, y’know, like you.” The obnoxious twelve year olds in the corner shouting about ‘pwning noobz’ call them both fags as they leave the arcade; the words sting at Ashton but Michael flips them off and laughs like it’s not a big deal. His mouth gets all sad around the edges though - when they get in the car and he turns the stereo on he looks kind of hollowed-out, like it’s eating away at him too. Ashton thinks for a minute about driving out to the beach again. In the end his growling stomach wins out and they use the last of his pay from the week before to get burgers and fries.

When he gets home from his shift at the grocery store later that night he’s too exhausted to do much besides stare out the window on the bus ride home. After he’s showered he remembers the photo strip in his wallet and pins them above his bed, careful to pierce the whitespace framing the shots so he can see the whole thing whenever he wants to. He looks at it for a long time, especially the second frame - Michael’s hand cupping his jaw while they kiss, fuck - before he falls asleep wishing his bed didn’t feel so empty.

Unsurprisingly, Ashton’s mum thinks that him flying to America is a terrible decision. While he’s packing his suitcase - he’s got three pairs of jeans neatly folded on his bed, a pair of faded pyjama pants, a week’s worth of t-shirts - she stands in the doorway worrying about it. “Isn’t this the same kid that you claimed ‘ruined your life’ when you were in twelfth grade?” she asks, resting both hands on her hips. She hands him a wrinkled dress shirt on a hanger and tsks at his suitcase, only half-filled. “At least take one pair of nice clothes. You don’t want to look scruffy.” And then she crosses to his closet, rummaging around among the boxes of holiday decorations stuffed at the back and thick winter sweaters to find his one and only pair of dress pants. Before he can open his mouth to protest they’re folded up and in his suitcase.

“Mum,” he whines, “I’m a grown man, I can pack my own suitcase.” He grouses as she adds another pair of socks to the pile. Thankfully she doesn’t delve into the mysteries of his underwear drawer - and wisely, he thinks, considering the lube shoved to the back of the drawer - but she does go through his pile of t-shirts and take half of them away, deemed too scruffy or offensive to be worn in public.

“I just don’t understand,” she says, refolding a pair of jeans.

He sighs and digs through the underwear drawer himself, carefully selecting his least embarrassing boxer shorts and setting them on top of the dresser to be packed. “Nothing’s going to happen, mum. Not like you’re thinking, anyway - Michael’s not a bad guy.”

She perches on the edge of his bed frowning up at him. “He made you cry,” she points out, smoothing down the bedspread in the middle of her matching his socks to each other. Once she’s satisfied that her eldest son isn’t going to look like a ratty bum in public, she fusses over his clean laundry. There’s no talking him out of going, not now - his flight leaves in the evening - but Ashton feels kind of shitty about leaving things at home the way they are. He’s been trying to work up the nerve to come out to his mum for days. Lauren’s been assuring him that their mum won’t care. He doesn’t share her optimistic viewpoint about it; he feels like it’s going to be a disappointment at best, and at worst… Well, he’s been trying not to think too hard about that possibility.

“Look, mum,” he sighs, searching for his phone charger in the tangle of cords behind his nightstand. “Everything’s going to be fine. I’ll get on my flight and then Michael’s picking me up at the airport, you’ve got nothing to worry about. He promised.” And as soon as the words are out of his mouth he knows how it sounds - but it’s too late to take them back now. The yellowing film strip from high school is still pinned above his bed. They’d both had really bad haircuts back then, when the emo styles were still kind of in vogue, but the pictures of them kissing have been there in plain sight for almost five years. Ashton takes a deep breath in and sits on the bed beside his mum.

“I don’t want you getting hurt again,” she says, and that kind of makes everything feel worse.

Ashton takes her hand in between both of his. “It’s not like that, mum, I swear. I just - um, fuck, sorry,” he says reflexively. There’s a long and uncomfortable silence as he thinks of what to say, and then - like the giant idiot he is - he blurts it all out in one breath instead of leading into it like he had planned. “I’m gay, mum,” he says abruptly. She makes a small, choked noise and without having to look Ashton knows he’s made his mum cry. And still he can’t stop, the words trickling out before he can shut his stupid mouth. “I really like him and I just - I just need to know if we can work.”

“How long?” she asks in a dead tone of voice. There’s mascara running down her cheek; she flinches away when Ashton reaches out to wipe it off for her like he always has. That breaks him most of all. “How long has this been going on?”

“Mum, please don’t cry, it’s okay,” he says helplessly. He reaches for her again, but she pulls away and walks out of his room crying quietly. For a long time he looks at his half-packed suitcase and considers not going. Michael would understand, probably - if he’s not in the midst of another sex scandal or something, fuck - and if he stays he can finish his management training workbook and everything can be okay. It has to be okay, doesn’t it? He sits on his heels in front of the suitcase for the longest time just staring at it like it holds the answers he’s looking for. If he strains his ears a bit he can hear his mum crying in the other room.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there feeling numb, but after a while he hears his mum and Lauren talking to each other in hushed voices, and then Lauren comes and sits on his bed. She reaches out and pets his hair and tells him, “Mum’s not mad at you. Just surprised, I think.”

“I made mum cry,” he moans, slumping forward until his forehead’s touching the top of the suitcase miserably. Lauren makes soothing noises and rubs his back. Once he’s stopped feeling like he wants to die, she puts all the things their mum had taken out back in his suitcase and zips it shut. She also makes quick work of finding his phone charger and, once she’s put that in one of the small zippered pockets, puts his passport in the front pouch of his backpack. After awhile he says, “Maybe I shouldn’t go. Maybe this is a really bad idea.”

“You have to go,” Lauren tells him point-blank.

“I don’t want to go if mum’s upset about it.”

That’s a blatant lie though - he does want to go, so bad it’s felt like he’s vibrating all day. He just doesn’t feel right about it if him being happy makes his mum sad. It leaves a cold, aching feeling in his chest that not even the thought of seeing Michael warms him up from. “Mum will be alright,” Lauren tells him. “It was a shock to hear, that’s all. You know she loves you and she wants you to be happy.” She flops back on his bed, eyeing the poster he’d tacked up in the corner. He pretends he hasn’t noticed. It’s weird, he knows it’s weird, that he has a poster of Michael’s band on his wall.

Ashton flops down alongside her and reaches for the film strip, pulls it down from where he’d tacked it up. “Things were so much easier in high school,” he says mournfully. He wonders if they’ll ever take more kissing pictures, if that’s something that’ll be off-limits now because of Michael’s career. There’s the - the Harry Styles scandal, he thinks bitterly - there’s that, so maybe not.

Lauren takes the pictures from him and looks at them. “I think if you give her time she’ll come around. I think - I mean, she must have had some idea. If I could figure it out on my own. It’s not like any of us missed the way you two looked at each other,” she says, glancing at the pictures once more. “I think mum’s just upset that she didn’t know.”

There’s not much time for him to brood over what had happened. He and Lauren eat a lunch of sandwiches and cold stares from his mum as she fusses over his bags piled at the foot of the stairs. Harry’s off with their uncle for the evening; Ashton hates that he’d cried saying goodbye to his little brother, but he’d rather have done his crying at home than at the airport surrounded by strangers. Once the washing up is done they all three pile into his mum’s car with few words between them. He and Lauren put his bags in the boot and sit together in the backseat, sharing headphones during the hour-long drive to the airport. When they pass the highway sign for the Sydney airport she squeezes his hand and mouths, ‘You excited?’ He nods.

His mum and Lauren wait with him at the check-in desk while he hands over his suitcase and has it weighed before the lady at the desk slaps a tracking label on it with a barcode and sends it sliding down the conveyor belt away from him. The departures board is lit up with all the different flights - it’s easy to find his flight, SYD to LAX, up near the top - and when she sees it his mum grips onto his hand death-tight. “Do you want some money for snacks on the plane,” she asks him suddenly, like he’s twelve years old.

“Um, sure,” he says, avoiding meeting her eyes. And then when she presses a couple of bills into his hand, “Thanks, mum.”

He has to leave them when he gets to the security checkpoint. Fuck, he doesn’t feel ready to. Before he gets in the long line of people holding their shoes in their hands he hugs Lauren tight and tells her to be good - and that no, she can’t borrow his car while he’s away - and she whispers in his ear, “It’s okay that you’re in love, big brother. Mum will understand,” and he almost cries when she lets him go.

Next he sweeps his mum in for a hug. They stand with their arms around each other for a long moment, and then she tells him, “You’ll be okay. I love you.” That’s when the tears start flowing, with him just dribbling like a little crybaby - and of course his mum produces a packet of tissues from her purse and dabs at his face. His bottom lip wobbles precariously. His mum pats his shoulder before she lets him go, and Ashton turns away to go through the security checkpoint. If she’s going to cry again he doesn’t think he can bear to see it, or he really won’t be able to get on his flight. He goes with his backpack and waits in the line, anxious about whether he’ll get selected for random screening and have to let them pat him down. The big burly guy running the security just looks at his passport and x-rays his backpack before waving him on.

The airport terminal is bustling with activity - people running from one terminal to the next for their connecting flights, airport employees waxing the floors and cleaning up spills - and it takes Ashton a few minutes to orient himself in the right direction for his terminal. Once he’s found it he sits in a hard-backed plastic chair near the jetway door. More people show up as it gets closer to their departure time, sitting one or two seats apart and keeping to themselves. He’s in one of the first groups to board - Michael had wanted to spring for first class but he’d argued his way down to coach - and he’s grateful that he’s got a window seat. As soon as the plane’s in the air and he’s listened to the flight attendants lecture the passengers about safety measures, he accepts a hard, lumpy little pillow and thin blanket from one of them and goes to sleep against his window. With his earbuds in and the blanket draped over him he can almost forget that he’s flying high over the ocean.

By the time he wakes up the sun is peeking through the edges of the window shade at a different angle than he’s used to. The flight’s nearly over - according to the itinerary it takes nearly sixteen hours to get to Los Angeles from Sydney - and when he checks the time he has to do some nastily complicated math to figure out what time it should be. He watches part of the edited-for-content version of Castaway on the drop-down screens until the pilot comes on over the speaker and announces, “The current local time is 9:32 a.m. In about fifteen minutes we’ll be landing at LAX. The weather today is predicted to be 22 degrees Celsius, 72 degrees fahrenheit with clear skies.” Ashton’s heart does a flip and nearly falls out his ass.

He grits his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut as they land. The nice lady sitting next to him had given him a stick of gum and told him, “This will help with your ears popping.” Chomp on it as he might, his ears still pop and leave him with a nasty headache on top of the stiff neck sleeping had given him. She gives him a tablet of ibuprofen while the plane is taxi-ing on the runway, whatever that means, and smiles sympathetically. “You look a bit green, honey,” she tells him.

“I’m nervous,” he admits.

“Flying to see your girlfriend, then?” the lady asks, eyebrows quirked up curiously.

He chews his gum thoughtfully and says, “Yeah, something like that.” Then they reach the terminal and everyone scrabbles to reach their belongings in the overhead bins, eager to see their families and friends. Ashton hangs back and waits for the bulk of passengers to exit the plane before he stands - his legs feel inexplicably wobbly - and retrieves his own backpack from under the seat. It’s just nerves, he tells himself. There’s still the customs checkpoint to go through and then the baggage claim anyway. The flight attendants had handed out a little card to fill out while they were still in the air; it’s basic stuff - country of citizenship, length of stay, contact information for emergencies, any meats, cheese or fruits to declare - but it had sent a spike of panic through him nonetheless. He thinks Michael will get a laugh out of the idea of illegal cheese, later.

The customs check is easy enough, anyway - just another big burly dude in a seemingly endless stream of them who looks him over and waves him on - and once he finds the correct baggage carousel his nerves start to fade away a bit. He watches the carousel go around three or four times before he finds his suitcase, slightly battered from the journey. It’s a long walk down the narrow hallway to the arrivals area of the airport. The closer he gets - purposely walking the entire way rather than using the moving sidewalks so he can compose himself - the faster his heart beats. It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the brightness of the sunlight when he leaves the corridor. He wishes he’d thought to grab his sunglasses off the desk. Fuck.

It doesn’t end up mattering - once he’s stepped out of the corridor suddenly there are arms around him, squeezing his waist tightly. “You’re here,” Michael says against his neck. “Holy shit.”

Ashton hugs him back just as hard, pressing his face into Michael’s flat hair to inhale his scent. He has to let go of the suitcase handle; it bumps against his thigh and tips over against them. Michael’s hair feels dry and slept-on when he runs his fingers through it. “’m so glad to see you,” he sighs. He squirms a little, blushes when Michael presses a half-dozen kisses to his neck eagerly. Their mouths meet clumsily, both too blissed-out and hyped up on nervous energy. Someone makes a rude harrumphing noise behind them; Ashton laughs against Michael’s shoulder, pleased, when he flips them off.

“Come on, I’ve got a car waiting,” Michael says, tugging on his hand impatiently. He’s bleached his hair again. It’s all soft and fluffy and unstyled - he must have just showered, Ashton thinks, since he smells incredible - and he keeps touching at it self-consciously while they walk out to the car together. He swats Ashton’s arms away when he tries to lift his own suitcase into the boot, tells him “I’ve got it, babe,” which sends a thrill shooting down Ashton’s spine. In the backseat of the car he pulls at Ashton, not satisfied until they’ve got arms draped over each other and Ashton’s head on his shoulder. He’s buzzing with his old brand of nervous excitement, glancing over every few seconds like he can’t believe that this is real.

In the pale sunlight Michael’s eyes look toxic green, the bags under his eyes from lack of sleep more prominent. “Looking at you is making me tired,” Ashton declares.

“I’m still not a morning person.”

Somehow Ashton’s not surprised by this revelation. “I slept on the plane and I’m still tired,” he confesses, playing with the zip on Michael’s hoodie. “Can we sleep when we get to the hotel?” The car’s not moving very fast - they’re stuck in gridlock, apparently, and the heat from the grey sun practically bakes him through the window. Michael complains some about the L.A. traffic, the whole time dragging his fingers through Ashton’s hair gently. He must doze off at some point; the next thing he knows they’ve pulled up to the hotel and Michael’s laughing softly at him. He doesn’t remember what the lobby of the hotel looks like either - he stumbles sleepily after Michael, bumping against his shoulder the whole way. Michael holds onto him in the elevator, always keeping one hand or arm curled around him.

In the hotel room, Ashton’s surprised to see that it contains two queen size beds. “I, um. I didn’t want to assume, so I thought -” Michael says awkwardly, pulling the door closed and throwing the deadbolt into place. The sentence trails off unfinished, and Ashton thinks it’s better that way. He looks between the two beds as he toes out of his shoes. One of them looks slept in. The gesture itself is sweet enough to put him off-balance. Ashton kicks out of his jeans clumsily and - after a moment of deliberation - pulls the pillows and the duvet off the unused bed and piles them on the other.

After he’s spread the duvet out and fluffed up the pillows to his liking, he crawls into the softest bed he’s ever laid on and pats the empty space beside him. Michael sheds his hoodie and jeans before climbing into bed himself. They find their way to each other easily enough, winding their bodies around each other in the center of the mattress. “I never want to leave this bed,” Ashton yawns. True to his promise, Michael’s feet are cold when they press against the backs of his calves. “I flew over the ocean for you and you couldn’t even put on socks,” he complains.

“You love it,” Michael says - and he’s not wrong. One of his hands slips under the thin fabric of Ashton’s t-shirt to rest against his bare skin. They exchange sleepy kisses until one - or maybe it’s both - of them falls asleep. And maybe he does love this; maybe Lauren’s right and he’s in love, but he’s not ready to admit it yet. It sure feels a lot like love, falling asleep in his maybe-boyfriend’s arms in the plushest bed he’s ever seen, well-kissed and heavy with jet lag.

The subject of Michael’s band playing gigs comes up naturally enough. They’ve been spending more time in his garage practicing recently and people other than their mums - and now Ashton - have taken notice. It starts gradually; they’ll get a last-minute request to play at somebody’s party across town, someone’s birthday party or something. And of course he can’t go to most of them. Since he works so much, looks after Lauren and Harry so much, most of the time it’s all but impossible for him to be available when the band has a gig. The haphazard last minute-ness of it grates on Ashton’s nerves. It’s important to Michael, so of course he wants to turn up to them, and he hates the way Michael’s face positively sags the next day when everyone rehashes the night before.

“You’ll come to the gig at the Annandale, yeah?” Michael asks him pleadingly. They’re at the skatepark, sitting under the lamppost with Ashton’s homework spread out between them. He’s let Ashton use his skateboard as a makeshift table to painstakingly write out the quadratic formula on a piece of looseleaf paper. Their holiday break is coming up, which of course means exams first - not that Michael’s put much thought toward them, rather occupied with band stuff as he has been lately - but afterward they have almost two weeks of no classes.

Ashton turns to look at him, near-glowing in the afternoon sun with his long legs stretched out in front of him. “Of course,” he says. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“Good, ‘cause I already got your name on the guest list. It’s, um, it’s just the one ticket for you though. So don’t, like. Bring someone else, or whatever.” Michael flushes when Ashton turns to look at him, picking at the rubber bracelets lining his wrist rather than making eye contact. Usually when they’re out together he tries to keep up a mask of indifference. Today his fondness is shining through in large measures for some reason.

Ashton rolls his eyes and spreads his arms out wide. “Who am I going to bring,” he chuckles, “My sister? My mum?”

“You never know!” Even the tips of Michael’s ears are going a bit pink. If they weren’t out in plain sight of the other punk kids Ashton would lean over and kiss him until the back of his neck went pink and he started to stutter his words. As it is he slips his arm through Michael’s and leans back, brain brimming with useless formulas and information on how to factor for ‘x’. He doesn’t complain when Michael slips the pen from behind his ear and doodles song lyrics all over his formula sheet.

Calum, after scraping his elbow something terrible doing a showy trick in front of a group of girls, ambles over to sit with them. Once he sees the blood running down Calum’s forearm Ashton automatically reaches into his bag for a plaster. “Here, get that covered up,” he says. In exchange for the plaster Calum gives him a stick of gum. There’s a comment about keeping his breath fresh ‘for later’ that makes Michael reach out and punch his best friend in the arm bitterly. It’s all in good humor - Calum throws his head back and laughs before he plops down on Michael’s other side.

“Oi, give me your notes,” Calum says after a while, taking both notebook and pen and writing out the formulas more neatly than Ashton ever could. He writes out two extra copies - one for himself and one for Michael too - and the whole exchange has become so ordinary that there’s no reason to protest it. Calum has the neatest handwriting out of everyone, so he’s taken it upon himself to copy Ashton’s notes from their shared classes. It’s easier than Ashton letting the punk kids fail - they don’t need to understand his notes to be able to parrot them back on quizzes. He’s not technically sure that Calum counts as a punk. After all, Calum does wear a gold chain and listens exclusively to Eminem. And he doesn’t have a Livejournal account, only a Myspace with a topless photo of 50 Cent as his background and a bunch of underground rappers in his Top 8.

Michael had changed his Top 8 a few days back to include Ashton and Calum alongside Fall Out Boy and Green Day. He hasn’t commented on any more of Ashton’s profile photos - which he’s been updating religiously at least once a week - but there have been a couple of cryptic song lyric posts on his Livejournal which Ashton’s been overanalyzing relentlessly. There have also been more mix CDs left in his locker between classes. He’s committed them all to memory: songs by Bowling for Soup and Zebrahead taking up space in his iPod next to Queen’s greatest hits and Led Zeppelin.

“Don’t know why you guys care about school so much,” Michael grumbles, reaching into Ashton’s bag to steal his iPod. He’s always careful with Ashton’s earbuds - painstakingly rolls them up when he puts them away - and every time he gives the iPod back there’s a new on-the-go playlist saved with his favorite songs of the day. While Ashton finishes his geometry worksheets he hums along to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ off-key. It would be annoying if it weren’t so infuriatingly charming. Michael’s a lot like that, though. Ashton would hate him so much if he weren’t funny and charming and persistent in his attempts at getting Ashton to turn up to one of his band’s gigs.

They sit out in the sun until it begins to sink low in the sky. It’s one of the rare days Ashton doesn’t have work and his mum’s home to look after his siblings. “You doing anything during the break?” Ashton asks, picking at the back of his elbow nervously.

“Not really. Thought we could hang out some,” Michael says.

“Cool.” Ashton reaches for his hand as the last of Michael’s friends say their goodbyes and scatter, each off in their own direction for dinner and likely a scolding for staying out all evening instead of doing homework. He still gets the same little thrill as the first time they’d held hands every time. Michael’s solid and warm, insulation against the slight cold settling in with the evening dark.

“D’you want to come over for a bit? My mum’s not home,” Michael tells him, one eyebrow raised meaningfully.

It takes a moment for Ashton to remember how to form words. “I, um,” he stutters - and he can feel his face going all hot and flushed, he can’t imagine how he looks right now - “Um, yeah. Yes. Okay. I want,” he says. “I’ll come over. Lead the way.” He holds onto Michael’s hand so tightly that both their knuckles turn white as they walk. It’s a short walk, only three streets over from his own home, but the unfamiliarity of it coupled with the idea of what might happen makes him feel light-headed. Michael’s house is nothing like his - the lawn’s been cut, the front door looks freshly painted - and upon entry doesn’t exactly look like what he’d been imagining. Everything is arranged just so with no sort of personality apparent from the furnishings.

For a second he thinks they’ve walked into the wrong house, until Michael sighs and goes, “So yeah, my mum’s a bit of a neat freak.” He kicks his shoes off in the corner of the front foyer; Ashton toes his own shoes off and lines them up carefully, thinking that his own mother would be horrified if he ever dumped his shoes in a pile like that. The walls are all painted a bright and pristine shade of white. It’s so unlike his own house, perpetually overrun with cast-off toys and dirty socks under the couch cushions and his siblings constantly making noise. “Come on, let’s go hang out in my room,” Michael says, leading him down a small staircase to the basement.

One half of the basement is open, unfinished aside from a small alcove with the washing machine and dryer nested inside. There’s a door that goes through to the other side - which is Michael’s room - and it’s a stark contrast to the way the rest of the house looks. He can’t see the walls for all the posters Michael’s got tacked up. “Do you actually have walls,” he asks jokingly, “Or is this a cardboard box you’ve disguised as a bedroom behind Green Day leering at us?”

Michael frowns at him and tries to sneakily kick a pair of dirty jeans under the bed. “Just - you’re a dick,” he says. He crosses to the other side of the room and puts his stereo on, turns Something Corporate down to a slightly less eardrum-bursting level.

“Probably a good thing I already liked you then,” Ashton tells him.

And then he lets himself get pulled down onto the bed after Michael, kissing messily, and the feeling of Michael so near to him in complete privacy is a new one. They end up a tangle of limbs around one another quickly - the smallness of the twin bed making it a necessity to press up against each other as much as possible - and soon enough Ashton’s got his hand up the front of Michael’s shirt. The skin there is warm and smooth. More importantly, Michael makes a soft appreciative noise the more skin he touches at. He starts tugging the shirt up after a while - he’s keen on getting them both as undressed as they can stand without making things weird. When Michael sits up and yanks the offending garment over his head, discarding it over the side of the bed, he pokes at Ashton’s stomach and goes, “Yours too.”

“Oh, um,” Ashton says, lifting his arms when Michael starts pulling it off. He feels bare and self-conscious without it, but Michael keeps looking at him like the greatest thing he’s ever seen. It makes him squirm and blush as Michael’s hands graze his sides on the way back to each other. His skin’s on fire, burning, the more they touch each other cautiously as they’re kissing.

At some point the music changes over to the next CD, but neither of them notice it happening. Too busy with Michael’s mouth on his neck, sucking marks into his skin to care about anything else in the world for once. He’s sure that Michael’s humming along with a few of the songs. Normally he’d be annoyed and swat him away, but right now Ashton feels stupidly fond of him; he’ll just have to remember for later that he’s supposed to be irritated. The thing is, if Michael keeps kissing him like this - and keeps running his hands over Ashton’s already prickly, too-hot skin - he’s going to end up forgetting. He’s going to forget and let himself want.

It comes as sort of a shock when Michael pushes him onto his back and straddles his thighs. Before now he’d been carefully angling his hips away to try and hide his half-hard cock, maintain at least some speck of decency. He loses all of that when Michael’s hips rock against his for the first time. “Fuck,” Michael says in his ear, sounding absolutely wrecked already. And Ashton wants him to do that again - keep sounding like that, all of it - so he digs his fingers into Michael’s hip and pulls him in closer. They start moving in something close to a rhythm rocking against each other until they’re both breathing hard. Michael breaks the kiss for a moment and looks down at him, propped up on his elbows. “Hi,” he says, rubbing his nose against the tip of Ashton’s.

“Hi back,” Ashton breathes, laughing a little at how they both sound.

Michael takes a moment to kiss him slowly, thumb rubbing against his jaw, and then asks, “Is this… okay?” The black of his pupils has swallowed most of his irises, leaving only a thin ring of green visible while he looks down at Ashton. Up close his lashes are long and dark when he blinks.

“Yeah.” And then Ashton’s hands settle on the little hollow between Michael’s shoulders, pulling him closer, as close as they can get. His hands stutter on their way down when he moves them, down to Michael’s belt buckle as he works it open carefully. He does his own, too, and pops the button on his jeans free. They’re almost scandalously tight - a pair borrowed from the back of his mum’s dresser when he hadn’t any clean ones - and the relief of not having his erection trapped by the unforgiving fabric is almost instant. He lets out a little moan against Michael’s skin, face pressed to his bare shoulder. Michael nips at his neck and shoulders lazily as they move against each other still half-clothed.

‘Konstantine’ is playing through the speakers and their bodies are pressed together, flushed and overstimulated and more than a little turned on. The music swells to a crescendo and there are Michael’s hands hovering above the waistband of his boxer shorts, Michael’s words soft and anxious. “Can I, um,” he says - and Ashton can see that he’s nervous, begging to touch, so he nods his head. Words would only betray him anyway; his mouth disconnected from his brain, focused only on the moment at hand. “Okay,” Michael says. His voice hitches a little, breathless and flushed with arousal. “Okay.” The way he does it is slow and careful; first he inches Ashton’s jeans down around his thighs, darting forward to kiss his shoulder or the curve of his collarbones.

He’s more hesitant about the boxer shorts - first his hands barely glide over the waistband, hooking his index finger under the elastic before he starts working them down slowly. Ashton appreciates the little gasp of surprise once he’s properly - well, most of the way; his boxers are all bunched up around one ankle - undressed. Michael’s eyes go wide at the sight of him. “Hey, you too,” Ashton says quietly, nudging at Michael’s shorts with his foot. “Don’t wanna be the only one naked.”

Michael kicks out of his clothes gracelessly, ending in a small pile on the floor. His naked body is long and lanky, all awkward angles in the light from the bare bulb on the ceiling. “Still okay,” he asks, resting one bare leg on either side of Ashton’s, bracketing him in in a very welcome way.

“C’mere,” Ashton says, reaching for him and pulling him back in for a kiss. It’s different now - with them both undressed - than it was before; it feels like they’re both holding back from making the next move, suddenly too shy in the honesty of this moment to admit that either of them want more than this. Michael’s hands remain above the waist while they continue to make out, pressing into the spaces between his ribs and rubbing over his chest roughly. Curiosity is what compels Ashton further - he stills in Michael’s arms for a minute and then slides his hand down to touch him, surprised and kind of thrilled as he brushes his fingers over the head of Michael’s cock. He brings his hand up and licks his palm before his first tentative stroke - Michael lets out a little moan at that, arches into the touch greedily. He’s soft and pale in all the places Ashton is hard and bitter - and more importantly he kisses Ashton’s neck appreciatively with every stroke, falls apart a little more with every touch.

He hides his face in Ashton’s shoulder and whimpers, “Please,” hands shaking as they curl into Ashton’s hair, tugging softly. The angle’s slightly awkward - it’s weird, touching someone else’s cock the way he’s only ever touched himself before - but when Michael comes with a low, shuddering moan Ashton feels accomplished, proud of himself. Michael goes loose and boneless on top of him for a moment. Once he’s recovered from his orgasm he shuffles over to lie down beside Ashton, singing along to the song under his breath. “… and I had these dreams that I would learn to play guitar,” he sings off-key, trailing his hand down Ashton’s chest to rest at his hip.

Michael plants sloppy kisses all along Ashton’s neck, still humming along when his hand encircles Ashton’s cock. With his other hand he touches at whatever skin he can reach, smoothing his palm over the long plane of Ashton’s chest while jerking him off. The music plays on, a soundtrack to the slow devastation of Ashton’s body as he comes apart on this bed - “Fuck,” he whines, fingers clutching at Michael’s shoulders while he tries not to fuck his hips up too desperately. It builds in the pit of his stomach, low-grade fire licking across his skin until he finally comes all over his stomach.

Once he comes down from the high of it he remembers to be embarrassed and tries to curl into a ball. “Dude,” Michael says, nuzzling at his shoulder when he turns away to hide his face. And if he says something stupid Ashton resolves to punch him. He peeks at Michael through the curtain of his fringe and then Michael goes, “I’ve never done that before,” and giggles, covering his face with both hands. They both burst into nervous laughter until neither of them can breathe.

“That was,” Ashton tries to say. He’s still catching his breath and the sentence dies off midway; Michael’s just looking at him with this unreadable expression somewhere between amazement and bewilderment.

“You wanna go upstairs and make pizza bagels?” Michael asks him later, after they’ve cleaned themselves up and gotten dressed. They microwave an entire package of them on a plate lined with paper towel and eat them over the counter island in Michael’s kitchen, scattering crumbs everywhere and smearing pizza sauce into the countertop. He doesn’t know if the feeling in his chest - tight and flustered and hopeful - is something or not, but he just - he hopes. There’s something in the way Michael reaches out to swipe his thumb across Ashton’s chin to get a dab of pizza sauce for him, catching on his lip and lingering there for entirely too long. Something in the way Michael looks at him while Boxcar Racer plays through the speakers and says, “This is one of my favorites,” with a stupid smile on his face.

Ashton’s terrified that it might be love between them. It might not be - but it’s sure as hell a close enough thing. When he has to leave later that night Michael walks him up the stairs and hovers near the front door with hands in his pockets. “So,” Ashton says, “I’ll um, I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

“Yeah, tomorrow,” Michael echoes. He reaches out and drags his fingers over a spot on Ashton’s neck - it stings, the memory of teeth and tongue scraping over his skin only a few hours old - before he pulls away looking sheepish. And then, “Wait,” and his fingers close over Ashton’s wrist to pull him back in for a long kiss. On the walk home Ashton runs his tongue over his teeth and the roof of his mouth a hundred times and he can still taste it. So he thinks it might actually be love. He’s less terrified by the idea than he feels he should be.

It’s raining when Ashton steps out of the cab, having dug to the bottoms of his pockets for the correct change to hand to the cabbie. The only people outside the Annandale are smoking cigarettes hunched under umbrellas. Even as quickly as he darts under the awning, his hair starts to curl around his ears and the nape of his neck - and the rainwater caught in his lashes stings when it drips into his eyes, leaving his squinty-eyed and out of breath when he gives his name at the doors. He feels cranky and stressed; he doesn’t want to be here with a bunch of people packed in tight like sardines. And then he feels bad for not wanting to come. Michael had obviously wanted him there, so he feels guilty about his lateness on top of everything else.

But he had gotten held up at home - their regular babysitter hadn’t been available so one of his mum’s work friends offered her daughter’s services for the evening - and as luck would have it the girl turned up late. So he’d called a cab and ended up stuck in traffic - it had seemed like a good idea at the time when he’d seen the wet gray clouds gathering in the sky. Halfway there it had started raining. The cab smelled bad, like stale cigarettes and sweat, and if Ashton hadn’t felt guilty when the babysitter had been half an hour late and it took another fifteen minutes for the cab to show up, he sure as hell feels guilty when he walks into the pub and Michael’s band is already onstage, sweating under the spotlights. Ashton hangs back from the crowd, just watching the way they react to the music in a frenzy, surging forward and rippling like the ocean tides.

He knows the moment Michael catches sight of him, too, during the bridge of ‘Try Hard’ when he stumbles over his words, hands falling away from the neck of his guitar suddenly. “Fuck,” he says. The microphone picks it up and for a second it echoes through the entire room. It’s followed closely by the wailing sound of feedback; Calum scrambles to fill in Michael’s singing parts while he regains his composure.

Ashton feels a swell of pride when the crowd cheers at the end of the set. Before he has a chance to make his way over the band are swarmed by teenage girls - most of whom he doesn’t recognize, most of whom are wearing tank tops and ties or arm warmers - and so he hangs back again feeling stupid. His skin prickles all over with jealousy the longer the crowd of girls linger around them, flirting and teasing and flicking their hair. Calum brushes past him on the way to the toilets, a look of annoyance on his face. “I can explain,” Ashton says when Michael finally gets around to him.

“Where were you,” Michael shouts hoarsely over the music. His fringe is glued to his forehead with sweat. The next band had set up quickly - a strange combination of electronica and thin, screeching vocals - and they’re so near to the speakers Ashton knows his ears will be ringing for days. He’s been so stressed out by the whole endeavor that he’s picked nearly the whole of the cuticles on his left hand away without realizing. “I waited for you,” Michael says.

The excuse feels flimsy as it rolls off his tongue, even though it’s true. “The babysitter was late,” Ashton tells him. “I had to wait for her to show up before I could go.”

“You could have left. Lauren’s eleven,” Michael argues, working his fingers through his fringe to unstick the hair from his sweaty forehead. And yeah, he probably could have done - it’s entirely possible that he babies his sister too much - but it’s been so long with just them that he hadn’t felt comfortable leaving his siblings to wait alone. He doesn’t say that because Michael has no siblings and won’t understand. It’s likely that he’ll see it as a betrayal of Ashton’s loyalty - and that will leave him with nothing to but defend his position, something he’s not keen to do.

“I know she’s eleven,” Ashton sighs. “I didn’t want to just leave them without anyone though. I thought - I took a cab the whole way here, I didn’t…”

Michael’s voice is whiny and petulant. “You promised you’d be here.”

“I’m sorry.” Ashton reaches out for him - he wants to make it better, make up for his lateness and the hurt he’s caused - only to have Michael push his hands away, frowning. “I did the best I could,” he says, stuffing his hands in his pocket to mask his embarrassment. Doesn’t it mean anything that he used the last of his money until payday to be here? He’s going to have to work extra hours to make up for it, to be able to take the bus to work instead of riding his bike.

“Look, just - Not good enough this time, Ash.”

He can’t hold in his words, this time. “It’s not like we’re dating, Michael,” he spits, pressing two fingers to his temple angrily. “I don’t owe you anything.”

Michael’s mouth goes small and drawn and he says “Fine,” and storms off in the direction Calum had gone. He should have thought better of his choice of words. After last night - he has to swallow hard at that, force himself not to think - after last night he shouldn’t have said that. It had meant something. He shouldn’t have said… Despite his better judgement he follows after Michael through the crowd.

Calum gets to him first, arms crossed over his chest. “Not now,” he says with the vitriol clear from his tone of voice. “I think you’ve done enough.”

“Fine, whatever,” he grumbles. There’s no reason for him to stay then - and he’s just gone and wasted fifteen dollars on a cab for nothing. Outside, the rain hasn’t let up and so he uses his last three dollars on a bus fare back to his house. He keeps his forehead pressed to the window the whole way. He wishes he’d brought his iPod or something - just something to help him ignore the tight, angry feeling in his chest that says he’s fucked everything up. There isn’t really any evidence to prove that he hasn’t.

And the babysitter seems relieved when he sends her home early and still pays her the same amount. Harry’s already in bed asleep with his thumb in his mouth when Ashton pokes his head in to check on him. He catches Lauren still awake reading. “I was just gonna,” she protests, lunging for the cord to her reading lamp to locate the switch.

“Don’t worry about it, Lo,” Ashton tells her.

She cocks her head at him curiously. “Are you okay?” she asks. Damn. He’d been hoping that with the bus ride home it wouldn’t be obvious that he had been crying. The hoarseness to his voice probably gave it away. But he’s not about to cry in front of his little sister, so he says that he’s fine and shuts himself in his room with the television on. Not much later Lauren lets herself into his room and curls up beside him; on another day he’d shoo her away, tell her she’s too old to share a bed. Tonight he shuffles over on the bed to make room for her, too glad for the company to think about being responsible.

It takes a while but eventually he does fall into a restless sleep to the laugh track of an old episode of _Seinfeld_. The rain carries on into the night, still drumming softly at his window panes when he awakens suddenly. He doesn’t realize immediately what’s woken him - he opens his eyes slowly, paranoid that their house is being burgled or something equally terrible - and it takes a moment before things click into place. There’s an awful rattling at the window. Lauren makes a soft sleepy noise beside him; Ashton extracts himself from the warmth and comfort of his bed delicately, pulling on an old cardigan to fight the chill in the house. He doesn’t turn the light on. The floorboards creak as he makes his way to the window and pulls aside the curtain.

What lunatic is throwing rocks at his window at… he checks the time on his watch, pressing the button on the side to light up the watch face with a sickly blue glow. What lunatic is chucking rocks at his window at 3:47 in the damn morning? He looks down to see a familiar, waterlogged form standing on the lawn holding something; his heart leaps in his chest, something like hope. The feeling gnaws at him until he puts slippers on and goes downstairs. It’s still pouring rain in sheets, guaranteeing overflowing sewers and swampy lawns in the morning.

“What are you doing,” he calls out into the night. He’s just got his head poked out the front door to shield himself from the rain. Even from a distance he can tell it’s Michael standing on his lawn, soaking wet and using his skateboard as a sad attempt at keeping the rain out of his face.

“I’m trying to say I’m sorry,” Michael shouts.

Ashton’s glad he has the door to brace himself against. His legs have decided to turn to mush. Whoever said grand gestures don’t accomplish anything was full of shit - his heart feels a little too big for his ribs, pounding against his skin to be set free. “Come here,” he says. It seems like forever before Michael’s on the doorstep, water running down his face despite his best attempt at staying dry. “What are you doing here?”

“I, um. Wanted to talk to you about before.”

“What is there to say?”

Michael scuffs his shoe against the ground. “I’m sorry? And, like, I never wanted you to get the wrong idea.” His eyes are glassy and speech slurred - it’s not hard to tell where he’s come from to get here. A part of Ashton wants to send him away. And he should do the responsible thing by sending him on his way; he should stand his ground from before and reiterate his point. The selfish part of him wants Michael to stay.

Lauren calls for him from the upstairs, asking where he’s gone. He knows what he has to do even if it hurts him. “No, I get it,” he says sharply. “What do you need me for when you’ve got girls throwing themselves at you now, right?”

“I never,” Michael starts, drawing back like he’s been punched.

“Just go,” Ashton says. He starts to close the door, too, but Michael shoves his foot in before he can close it all the way. “I said go,” he repeats, feeling his resolve start to falter.

And like he’s done through the course of their relationship Michael wedges himself through the door, dripping all over the front hallway. “Tell me it didn’t mean anything,” he says. When Ashton doesn’t answer - he can’t answer, that would be admitting that it meant everything - Michael takes a step forward and kisses him hard. It’s so easy to slip back into the habit. He kisses back, only pulls away when the bathroom door slams upstairs and he becomes painfully aware of his surroundings. Michael’s mouth had tasted of alcohol anyway; he shouldn’t be doing this.

He says, “I can’t,” and what he really means is ‘I shouldn’t.’ He thinks that Michael can see through it too. Still, he has to set a good example for his siblings. “Mikey,” he says, and his voice cracks. “Please just go.”

“Then say it,” Michael says quietly. “Tell me it never meant anything and I’ll go.” His voice is steady and his hands aren’t, trembling slightly as he curls his fingers around Ashton’s wrist. And Ashton says nothing again - he’s run out of words, all the resolve sucked right out of him with his breath. Michael kisses him again, this time barely brushing their lips together.

In another lifetime - one without the pressures and responsibilities - Ashton would beg him to stay. He’d say something like ‘Let’s get you out of those wet clothes’ and mean it sincerely like they do in the movies. Instead he balls his hands up into fists at his sides and says, “What am I supposed to do?” in a small voice. Michael leaves without a word. He doesn’t slam the door or storm away or anything, just shrugs his shoulders and looks wounded and goes. It’s a quiet heartbreak but it still manages to sting in all the right places.

It might be better that way - that’s what Ashton’s telling himself when he goes back to bed - so he doesn’t have to think so much about it. Lauren’s sound asleep in his bed still and the late night infomercials are playing. He doesn’t fall back asleep until long after the sun’s started rising. When he gets out of bed long after noon he feels small and bitter and selfish. No matter how long he stands in the shower watching the water swirl down the drain it doesn’t make him feel any better. It doesn’t feel better when his mum makes quesadillas for lunch or when Lauren surrenders the remote so he can watch the footy game in the evening. It sure as hell doesn’t feel better when he logs onto Myspace that night - and he knows he shouldn’t, knows it’s going to hurt - and Michael’s changed his Top 8 to all bands again plus Calum.

He’s got a new profile song. The chorus goes ‘I want to hate you half as much as I hate myself’ and Ashton feels like he’s been sucker-punched every time he replays it. There are pictures up on the band profile page from the show. In them Michael looks tall and handsome and confident - which is about the exact opposite of the way Ashton feels for the rest of the weekend. Every time he looks at himself in the mirror he can see the fading marks from that night and it feels a little like the memory of Michael’s mouth is haunting him. It doesn’t feel good. And if he goes and buys Fall Out Boy’s new album with his next paycheck it’s curiosity that compels him. It has nothing to do with the song.

The door wakes them both up. It takes Ashton to remember where he is - the first thing that registers in his mind are the arms around his waist - and then he doesn’t want to move. Michael makes a grumpy noise and mumbles, “Door, get the door.” When Ashton makes no move to get up Michael’s quick to give him a little push. “I told Harry to come this afternoon, go,” he groans, muffled by the pillow he’s pulled over his head in direct opposition to the sunlight streaming through the gauzy hotel curtains. And Ashton’s sleep-addled brain can’t make sense of the idea of afternoon. His body says it should be too early in the morning to be awake. Still, he crawls out of bed reluctantly to answer the door. It takes him an embarrassingly long moment to figure out the deadbolt before flipping it open.

He cracks open the door to the smiling visage of Harry Styles, teen pop idol, with a carrier tray full of coffees in one hand and a thick paper take-out bag in the other. “Good morning,” says Harry. His voice is deeper than Ashton had expected for a boy of only eighteen; it’s at odds with his fresh-faced persona all pink-cheeked and bright-eyed on the posters in the magazines. He’s not dressed up in his pop star clothes though - he’s just wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, scruffy-looking sneakers - and the first thing he does after he sets down the things in his hands is to shake Ashton’s hand firmly and go, “Michael’s told me loads about you. It’s good to finally meet you.”

For all the calm that he’s felt so far, this is the first time Ashton has felt truly starstruck. “I - really? Wow, um… Hi,” he stammers, inexplicably nervous. He remembers to feel self-conscious about his bare legs and bed hair. Pleasantries out of the way, Harry pulls him into a hug briefly before turning back to the table and the steaming coffees. There’s a Starbucks on every corner in Los Angeles - he must have just stopped on his way over.

“Pike Place, three sugars, right?” Harry asks, handing him one of the drinks.

And that small gesture endears him to Ashton, who can reliably be plied with coffee. It tastes just the same as it does back home - a fact for which he is infinitely grateful - and then it comes as a surprise that Harry picks the other hot cup out of the tray, leaving the frappucino with a sickly-sweet amount of whipped cream for Michael. “Yeah, thanks,” Ashton says, blinking as the first sips of coffee jolt him properly awake. He remembers his bare legs and zips his suitcase open, pulls on the first pair of jeans he can find. Once he’s properly dressed he glances back at the frappucino sweating under its dome lid and muses, “Thought you didn’t drink coffee.”

From under the mountain of covers Michael says, “’S not coffee, it’s sugar,” and he slowly sits up in bed.

“You do know that Starbucks puts espresso in everything, right? Like even their non-coffee drinks?” Ashton tells him.

Harry folds himself neatly into one of the plush armchairs and goes, “It’s a lost cause, mate. I’ve been telling him this for months. He doesn’t listen.” And then he takes a sip from his venti Americano primly. His trademark curls are held back by a scarf wound twice around his head, the little tails of it trailing down his neck loosely. He’s nothing like anyone Ashton’s ever met before. The corners of Harry’s lips turn up, amused, when Michael stumbles out of bed with his hair sticking up in strange directions and proceeds to trip on the leg of the dresser opposite the beds.

Michael disappears into the bathroom. When he emerges several minutes later - Ashton and Harry making small talk about his flight, the hotel, the sights and sounds of Los Angeles - he’s flattened his hair down a bit with tap water and he looks more awake than he had before. “G’morning,” he says, ignoring the third chair that Harry had pulled up to the table in favor of dropping himself in Ashton’s lap. The first thing he does is lunge for the take-out bag and rifles through it, pulling out a store-bought fruit tray and a box of muffins still warm from the bakery. Underneath that there’s a box of a dozen donuts, each a different flavor. After he’s consumed an entire Boston creme donut in two bites he takes a long sip of his frappucino and leans back into Ashton’s chest, satisfied. “’s good, Haz, thank you.”

“I was thinking we could go to Santa Monica today,” Harry says, looking at them with a fond expression on his face. “Paul says the weather’s supposed to be a bit overcast, y’know, not too many tourists out and about. See if Louis and them want to come along, maybe.”

Ashton wonders what’s in Santa Monica. Michael tells him, “You’ll love it there, Ash. It’s the weirdest place. There’s a man who just goes around all day playing guitar on his rollerskates.” He’s warm in Ashton’s lap, his bare thighs just within arm’s reach. If Harry weren’t right there in the room with them Ashton would protest going out and doing site-seeing touristy things. But Harry is there, fidgeting with the paper airplane charm on a long chain around his neck. After they’ve eaten the impressive array of breakfast foods they make plans to leave for Santa Monica in a little over an hour.

Actual human being Harry Styles is different than Ashton had expected. Once the hotel room door’s closed behind him, Ashton has to ask. “So are we playing matchmaker today?” he asks. The nervous tics hadn’t been lost on him when Harry had asked after Louis, the ‘and them’ merely a clumsy afterthought as he attempted to cover his tracks. A bit of a strange match for a pop star, he thinks, remembering Louis’s tattoos and snarky attitude. On the other hand maybe that’s the appeal in the first place - the stereotypical bad boy in a leather jacket and the pop princes. Although Ashton would never call Harry a pop princess to his face, at least.

“I figured we’d stick around for an hour or two and conveniently wander away,” Michael says. He’s smirking as he says it though, the same mischievous gleam in his eyes that he’d had when they were still in high school. This is more than skipping the pep rally or cutting out of class early to smoke behind the school dumpsters though.

Ashton sits on the edge of the unmade bed they’d shared and watches Michael as he dresses. “Does Louis know?” he wonders aloud. His attention is quickly diverted when Michael begins the slow, awkward dance of putting jeans on - he hops around a few times as he shimmies the tight denim up around his thighs before flopping down on his back beside Ashton, stomach sucked in to do the button up properly. “This is the opposite of what I want you to be doing right now,” Ashton says under his breath.

“We have,” Michael tells him, glancing at the alarm clock on the nightstand and its oversized display, “Twenty minutes before we’re supposed to be leaving. Don’t tempt me,” and then he’s laughing and pulling Ashton by the front of his shirt into a kiss, pulling his full weight down so their bodies are pressed flush together. All Ashton can think is ‘God, I’m so in love with you’ and it comes as less of a shock to realize than he’d thought it would. Michael kisses him slowly, gives him complete and undivided attention. Even now he can only grow a sparse amount of stubble along his jaw, patchy and stubborn. They spring apart not at the first knock on the door - a warning knock, the customary get-decent warning signal - but the second, firmer one.

This time it’s Michael who gets the door, hastily tucking the mess of his hair under a gray beanie before he opens it. Harry bursts into their room brimming with excitement. “Come on,” he says, bouncing on his toes. “Car’s waiting.” They pile into the elevator along with Paul, the large and burly security guard dressed in unassuming jeans and a windbreaker. Outside the hotel a nondescript black SUV waits for them, engine running.

The interior of the car smells new. Harry climbs into the passenger seat, has to move the seat back to accommodate his long legs. Paul holds the back door open for them to take the middle row of seats before getting in on the driver’s side himself, waiting for them to buckle themselves in before putting the SUV in drive and heading for the highway. And Ashton can kind of see, now, why Michael and Harry work together as friends - Harry talks to them through the half hour drive, pointing out landmarks and bits of interesting history until they leave the city, totally unpretentious - and he leans into Michael’s touch, chin resting on his shoulder to watch the signs on the highway

Harry looks back at them and smiles broadly. “You two make a good couple,” he says, again fidgeting with his necklaces.

Then they’re pulling into a parking lot that looks out onto the beach and Ashton understands why they’ve come. It’s not just the vastness of the ocean that draws people to Santa Monica and its star attraction, the Venice Beach boardwalk. The houses are small and quaint, with stucco siding and painted-bright clapboard shutters. Even with the overcast weather and gray sky the boardwalk is still bustling with people walking from vendor to vendor discovering all that the beach has to offer. Michael holds his hand as they walk along the edge of the boardwalk just behind Harry.

On the left side of the boardwalk are the art vendors, each with an impressively colorful and mismatched collection of pieces for sale. There are guys walking through the crowd with boxes full of jewel cases handing out their mixtapes; Harry takes one from everyone who offers, gathering them up in his arms and thanking each person profusely, clasping his big hands around wrists and arms before adding them to the plastic bag of odds and ends he’s collected. Paul hovers cautiously behind them, watchful, but even he laughs when they stop at one of the clothing vendors and Harry plonks a floppy sun hat on his head.

It’s Paul who first notices the paparazzo trailing them. He gets a grim look on his face and draws close to them, throwing his arms over Michael’s and Harry’s shoulders casually. “Not to alarm anyone,” he says in a low voice, “But I think it prudent to let you know that we’ve got company.” Harry’s expression goes strange and closed-off for a moment, then - like a mask settling over his features - he turns on the star quality magnetism that had propelled him to third place in the X Factor to begin with.

“Will you be okay?” Harry asks, glancing at Ashton thoughtfully before jerking his chin toward the camera lens poking out from behind the changing curtain in the t-shirt vendor adjacent to them.

Ashton grips Michael’s hand a little tighter and - after he swallows past the lump in his throat - nods. He knows what Harry’s really asking, knows what his answer is. He’s new to this game and maybe he doesn’t know all the rules, yet. But this is Michael’s world now and yes - yes, he wants to be in this. “I’ll be fine,” he tells them after a moment. “Tomorrow morning they’ll be asking if we’re having threesomes in all the headlines.”

Harry and Michael share an amused look. “I don’t like to share,” Michael says, pulling Ashton in for a kiss in plain view of the camera. He’s not playing it up for the camera though, clumsy and love-drunk rather than composed and showy the way one might expect. The wind bites at their cheeks, cold and stinging after blowing in from the ocean. And Harry gives them that private moment - posing for the camera by a different stall, making a show of examining the display of dreamcatchers until they pull apart.

“Good,” Ashton tells him, reaching up to push a strand of hair under the beanie where it’s poking out. “I don’t want to share you, either.”

They make their way down the boardwalk still hand in hand with Harry leading the way, pausing every once in a while for the cluster of cameras following after them. It’s riveting to watch Harry work his star power, the way he knows innately which angles and poses will make the most compelling shots for the headlines. The way he protects both of them by taking the lead, angling his shoulders just so or stepping out half an inch to block their kisses from the intrusive eye of the cameras. Harry Styles is a very good friend to have. Ashton notices that Paul’s good too, keeping one or two steps behind them to stay out of the money shots for the paparazzi as they capture the end of their day trip to the beach.

The paparazzi get some shots of them at a small restaurant at the end of the boardwalk before Paul steps in - smiling politely, voice even and measured the whole time - to ask that they be allowed to enjoy the rest of their meal in peace. And while Harry may project an innocent, carefree persona for the cameras, as soon as they’re gone he and Michael trade drinks in a well-practiced exchange - his soda for Michael’s pint. Ashton notices all these little details and appreciates them; the small ways that these two from completely different backgrounds and journeys to stardom care for each other. If he hadn’t known, before, that he was in love with Michael he thinks that it’s definitely apparent now. Harry seems disappointed that Louis hadn’t come with them to the beach despite being in town - but Ashton understands that too, the desire to stay out of the spotlight. The desire to not see the way people throw themselves at any scrap of celebrity they can get, the giggling girls that keep glancing over at them nervously from a few tables over. He doesn’t know much of Louis’s story, but Ashton has the distinct feeling that this celebrity skin isn’t one he ever planned to wear.

By the time they’re back in the SUV that evening Ashton feels absolutely exhausted. “Good first day in America?” Michael asks, offering his shoulder up as a pillow. Harry politely turns a blind eye, staring resolutely out the front window so they can kiss.

“The best,” he answers. “Couldn’t have asked for better company.”

He had intended to hate Harry - or at the least keep up an attitude of polite disdain - but in the end he’d found it quite impossible to hate the real Harry Styles. It turns out that he’s a lot more than just Harry Styles, teen pop sensation. He’s sharp as a tack, witty, and surprisingly down to earth for someone who’d found fame at such a young age. Ashton resolves to convince Louis to come out with them the next time they go sightseeing. If he just saw this side of Harry - the real side, not the contrived plastic side in all the magazines - there’s no way he’d be able to resist. That’s the thing with being in love, he thinks. Once you’re properly in it - like properly, head over heels in it - you can’t help wanting everyone else to be, too.

The hardest part about it is that Ashton can’t even be properly hurt by what had happened. It’s not like there had been an actual breakup for him to recover from, just the Michael-shaped holes left in his life - the music on his iPod, movie ticket stubs pinned to the wall above his bed that he takes down and shoves in the back of a drawer. He can’t bring himself to take the pictures from the arcade down. Looking at them leaves a gaping hole in his chest. The hurt piles up piece by piece until it feels like he’s sagging under the weight of it - and then he has to keep it to himself because nothing real had happened.

For the weekend he can pretend that nothing’s different. He plays games with Harry and watches TV with Lauren and does all the housework he’d fallen behind on keeping up with. The laundry gets folded, the kitchen counters scrubbed, even the grout in the showered cleaned out in an attempt to cast Michael and everything to do with him out of Ashton’s mind. He’s trying to get back to the person he was before Michael and failing miserably. On Sunday afternoon he sits down at the computer to try and take his mind off everything, faltering as he opens the CD tray to put the disc in for DOOM 2. Lauren’s on the couch watching a _Degrassi_ marathon - end of the season recap or something like that - on the N, Harry at a friend’s house for a play date. He puts the disc in and closes the tray quickly. While the disc drive whirs to life in the computer tower Ashton opens the internet browser and types the URL for Livejournal.

There’s a new post titled ‘heartache on the big screen’ in all lowercase. Ashton hovers over the cut text, wondering if he hates himself enough to click on it and see what it says. The DOOM loading screen pops up before he has a chance to press down on the left mouse button. He breathes out shakily, curling his fingers around the keyboard tray. It doesn’t have to be about him - it can’t be. All he can do is try not to care. There are demons to be killed in the game - he has to help Doomguy clear the space port, get it ready for launch. He’s always liked the anonymity of the main character, an unnamed space marine until the very last chapter of the game. Once he’s played all the way through it he gives up - he could play the Final Doom expansion again but he’s not, he doesn’t want to - he wants… And at the revelation of John Romero’s name at the end of the game the floodgates open and he finds himself crying not over the Annandale or the kiss but his own frustration at feeling like something’s been left undone.

He presses control-alt-delete to get out of the game and stares at Michael’s Livejournal until it feels burned into his eyelids every time he blinks. There’s a new band in his Top 8 as well - something hard and angry and screechy, which just about fits the way Ashton feels. It’s stupid to be upset about not being in Michael’s Top 8. It’s not - it’s not like that bullshit classification actually means anything, it’s not like being number two out of eight ever meant he was important. He logs out without posting anything.

 _Degrassi_ can’t even take his mind off things when he plants himself on the couch next to Lauren. “What episode are we on?” he asks.

“Fourteen,” she answers him. “Marco’s gonna ask Ellie out so people will stop thinking he’s gay.” And she seems so nonplussed by the whole thing - by seeing a gay character on television, not that much younger than himself - that it makes him sick to his stomach. He’s such a coward.

“Okay,” Ashton says finally. His lower lip is trembling as he walks away, up to his room, so he can pull a pillow over his bed and sob silently into the mattress.

He makes it through until Monday morning. His resolve crumbles around the same time he gets up for school and discovers he has no clean shirts left, goes to dig through the dirty laundry hamper for one that he hasn’t worn in a few weeks. And at the bottom of the hamper he finds the hoodie of Michael’s that he’d brought home forever ago meaning to give back. It’s still unwashed - still smells like Michael - and the sight of it makes his stomach twist itself into a bow, his guilt at the entire situation gift-wrapped in a neat little package. After a few minutes he gives up any semblance of normality there had been left for him to cling to and pulls yesterday’s shirt back on. It’s not like he saw anyone important yesterday, anyway. He realizes the absurdity of his ‘Ohio is for lovers’ t-shirt, which is why he generally only wears it on weekends - he’s never been been to America, much less the state of Ohio - but it’s going to have to be good enough. The hoodie gets shoved to the back of his closet; he’ll deal with it later, when he doesn’t feel like his heart will fall out his ass.

“Are you getting sick?” his mum asks when he goes downstairs, busy with her car keys and the travel mug he’d gotten her last year for her birthday. She presses the back of her hand to his forehead and frowns at him. “You’re staying home today,” she says firmly.

“Mum, I can’t,” he protests, following her to the kitchen where she puts the kettle on.

She fixes him with that terrifying mother-knows-best glare and tells him to sit down. “You look like hell, Ashton. You’re going to stay home today and get some rest and I’m not going to argue about it with you.” Once the kettle’s whistling she makes him a cup of echinacea tea and commands him to drink the entire thing. It tastes awful - bitter and earthy - and he splutters his way through the entire mug until all that’s left are the tea leaves at the bottom. He helps his mum bundle Lauren and Harry into the car before she goes; their schools are both a bit out of the way for her and he could have dropped them both off. That aside, he hasn’t had the house completely to himself in years. There’s always someone else home with him - Harry and Lauren and sometimes his mum - so he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself for an entire day alone.

An hour after everyone’s left the silence gets to him - he’d tried to go back to bed, revel in the fact that he has nothing to do beside sleep after he’d gotten a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He understands why his mum was concerned; his reflection looked pale and drawn, dark circles like bruises beneath both his eyes. It feels like there’s been a hole punched in his chest. Then he realizes that if he doesn’t show up at school everyone will know - they’ll think he’s not there because of Michael, they’ll know what’s happened - and he can’t have that. It’s too late to show up at school now and besides that Ashton was there when his mum had called to say he would be out sick.

There’s only one thing to do. Ashton takes the heavy duvet from his bed downstairs and leaves it in a pile on the couch, makes another cup of tea - earl grey this time, not more foul-tasting echinacea - while he waits for the computer to boot up. He turns the television on and puts on MTV in the background while the internet connects, modem squawking noisily the entire time. Once it’s ready, he logs onto Myspace and opens up a new bulletin post, hands poised over the keyboard tray. It’s petty. It makes him feel small and used as he clicks through bulletins from the weekend in another window while he thinks of what to say. Michael’s filled out a couple of those long-form surveys that claim to be ‘so random’.

The fourth or fifth question down reads ‘When did you fall in love for the first time?’ and Ashton expects to see a stupid made-up answer.

‘the first time you told me a secret under the streetlight’ is the answer. He scrolls through the rest of it - inane stuff like zodiac sign, favorite color - and at the bottom of the survey there’s another question. ‘Kissed in the rain?’ Ashton clicks out of the window abruptly and goes back to the text field to write his bulletin. ‘Out sick today,’ he types, adding a sad face at the end so people will know he’s serious. ‘Can anyone get the homework for today and email it to me? Thanks guys,’ and before he can begin to second-guess himself on the sad face he posts it. Committed to cyberspace maybe it will seem less pathetic that he’s home alone and wants to be at school. He never thought he’d want to end up stuck self-torturing to be close to Michael. And he has no right to want to be anymore - he did this to himself, to protect what he’s built for himself and his family, to protect his siblings.

The words ‘this weekend’ are stuck on repeat while he watches _Punk’d_. This weekend. This weekend, when he’d washed up on Ashton’s lawn drunk and bright-eyed with earnestness, ready to forgive him even though he’d done nothing to deserve forgiveness. This weekend, when they’d kissed in the rain blowing in through his front door before Michael had all but begged to know if he’d meant anything. And Ashton had lied. He wishes he could control-alt-delete himself. It was selfish of him to let Michael kiss him knowing that he was going to turn around and ask him to leave.

Later in the day he gets up off the couch, out of his fortress of blankets and pillows, to check Myspace again. There’s nothing new from Michael; a couple of people email him from the school library about what assignments he’s missing but other than that, there’s not a lot for him to do besides channel flipping or playing video games. He looks through the band pages that keep messaging him to ‘Check out my band! :)’ on Myspace and listens to the songs they’ve put up. After a while he finds a band called Brand New and listens to the few songs on their page before setting ‘The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot’ as his profile song. It’s the first time he’s had one of those - and it’s small and petty that he does it now, too - and he hopes Michael understands his response to ‘The Pros and Cons of Breathing’.

He does hope that Michael can forget. He doesn’t think he deserves forgiveness after all he’s done. Ashton shuts the computer down with a heavy heart and trudges back up to the safety of his bed, blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a cape.

They’re at breakfast the next morning with Luke and Calum. It’s early still - the only people on the streets are commuters from outside the city on their way to office tower jobs in their suits and ties - and they have the restaurant pretty much to themselves. Michael’s sitting next to him in the booth, all elbows and knees so early in the morning every time he moves, and Ashton had been worried about feeling awkward once he was with the band all together. So far they haven’t been; Luke and Calum had each welcomed him with a hug before piling into the car that had come for them. It all settles into place so easily. Their waitress is a stout middle-aged lady who raises her eyebrows in recognition briefly, but says nothing about the band and shepherds the giggling girls who enter a few minutes after their seated to a section across the room and out of earshot.

“Order whatever you want, babe,” Michael tells him, grinning widely. “Label’s paying for everything.” Luke makes obnoxious kissy noises at them, one arm slung around Calum’s shoulders in a carefree maybe-we-are, maybe-we-aren’t gesture. Ashton’s seen all the speculation online about the nature of their relationship - the girls and a handful of guys, too, who ship them together on Livejournal and make masterposts about ‘moments’ they’ve shared on and off the stage. His aging computer had protested at the idea of loading that many images all at once, though, so he hadn’t explored that side of the fanbase for very long.

Calum makes a point of ordering steak and eggs - the most expensive item on the menu - and smirks the entire time they’re ordering. Ashton is too aware of the teenagers goggling at them to contribute to the conversation at hand, a heated argument about whether or not Katy Perry actually kisses girls in real life. He’d slept restlessly thanks to the time difference and his continuing jet lag, tossing and turning long after Michael had fallen asleep beside him. The morning news is playing muted on the televisions mounted on the wall; Ashton leans into Michael’s side and watches the news ticker scroll along, sipping his coffee slowly.

He doesn’t realize that he’s been zoned out until Michael pokes his cheek softly and repeats, “You don’t mind hanging out at the hotel by yourself for a bit while we’re at interviews, do you?”

“No, of course not,” Ashton tells him. And he doesn’t mind mostly - he can probably sneak a nap in, call his mum from their room as soon as it’s morning in Australia - but he’s also greedy for as much of Michael’s time as he can get in the short time they have together. He puts his best smile on and says, “Don’t worry about me. I’m sure I’ll find something to do.”

“Rent a bunch of pay-per-view pornos,” Luke suggests, ducking his head when Calum - in a practiced and long-suffering motion - reaches out to smack him.

“Don’t be a brat,” Calum scolds him. It’s not a serious scolding; a moment later he’s tracing his fingers over Luke’s tattoos and nuzzling against his shoulder.

Michael holds Ashton’s hand on top of the table, ignoring the girls snapping pictures on their brand new iPhones as they pass by on far too many trips to the toilets, clutching each other’s arms and giggling. He acts like they’re not even there. “Don’t feed the birds,” he whispers in Ashton’s ear before kissing his cheek playfully. Apparently girls with cell phone cameras are par for the course, now. All it does is make Ashton wish he’d taken the time to shower before they left the hotel, make himself presentable. It feels like a stupid thing to worry about - Michael’s in pyjama pants slung low on his hips, there’s a hole below the left armpit of Calum’s shirt and Luke looks barely awake - but he’s not used to being in the spotlight and it makes him feel a bit… exposed.

Outside the restaurant they stop to pose for photos with each of the group of girls. Ashton hangs back awkwardly, takes one of the free papers out of the newspaper rack and flicks through it. There are a couple of grainy photos of their outing on the entertainment page, mostly focused on Harry. At the bottom of the photo spread there’s a small one where he can definitely see Michael kissing him in the corner of the frame. He rolls it up to keep, wondering if these pictures have made the news anywhere else. If they have his mum’s going to shit herself. And that’s a conversation he’s dreading - he hasn’t spoken to his mum since the airport and before that things had been tense. He hasn’t been dealing with coming out very gracefully at all. It’s not exactly fair of him to leave her with all that a day before he’s suddenly been thrust into the spotlight and there are photos of him kissing Michael in the entertainment pages.

“Have you seen this?” he asks Michael, pointing at the shots with them in the frame.

Michael skims over the page with disinterest, says, “The good shots will be in the big name tabloids,” and wrinkles his nose. “They pay more,” he explains. And if these are just the bargain bin shots from yesterday, Ashton’s stomach drops at the idea of what could be in the major celebrity gossip magazines.

The car pulls up to the curb, ready to take them back to the hotel to get changed before their interviews. Ashton stares out the window on the way back, ignoring the conversation in favor of silently freaking out about how his mum is dealing with pictures of him kissing Michael being in the tabloids. He feels cold and numb. It’s a good thing, then, that they arrive back at the hotel quickly so he can hide under the covers and pretend none of it is happening. Calum and Luke are on a different floor - they part ways at the tenth floor, leaving Michael and Ashton alone for the elevator ride to the fifteenth floor.

Once they’re in the hotel room Michael asks him, “Are you okay? You seem kind of out of it.”

Ashton could tell him it’s just the time difference, the jet lag messing with his head and making him irritable. Instead he takes a deep breath hoping to soothe his shaky nerves and says, “I came out to my mum before we drove to the airport and I haven’t spoken to her since then. I don’t want the first thing she hears from me to be pictures in a tabloid with some fake story.”

“Babe,” Michael says, dropping the shirts he’d pulled out of his suitcase to pull Ashton into a tight hug. He holds on for a long moment that seems to go on forever before he sighs, messes up his already messy hair, and goes, “You’ll be okay. Try not to worry about it too much while I’m gone. Your mum… She loves you, she won’t believe whatever bullshit people write about us. Even if it’s not okay right now she’s still going to understand eventually.”

And Ashton says “Okay,” and sprawls out on the bed when Michael lets go of him, but he doesn’t know if it’s going to be okay at all. He watches Michael get dressed - and god, he’s never going to get tired of that - while he does the math in his head, trying to figure out what time it is at home. Too early, still. There are worse places in the world he could be than a nice hotel overlooking the beach. And yet somehow he doesn’t feel much like going to the beach; he wants to stay holed up in the hotel, just the two of them and no one else. The word ‘stay’ is on the tip of his tongue when Michael, now fully dressed, leans over and kisses him sweetly on his way out the door to rejoin Luke and Calum.

Michael tells him, “I’ll see you when I get back.”

“I might try to sleep some,” Ashton says. “If I’m still asleep when you get back, wake me up.” He busies himself for the remainder of the morning with a long, hot shower in the bathroom that’s larger than his bedroom at home, standing under the spray until the water runs cold. It doesn’t help to clear his head much, but it does ease him into wakefulness more than the two cups of coffee had. After he’s dressed he takes one of the keycards for the hotel room with him and goes down to the hotel gift shop to buy a copy of all the tabloids he can get his hands on. There’s not much of a selection to be found - he goes back to the room with the Daily Mail and the Mirror and flips through them. He skims through an article speculating about what the rumors of Harry’s sexuality mean for his future - they get most of the details wrong, given what he knows about Harry - and flips past the pages and pages of ads.

The Daily Mail doesn’t have much more to say than the Mirror had. There’s a shot of Harry near Muscle Beach; it’s grainy, almost impossible to identify Michael and Ashton behind him. Ashton wouldn’t have recognized himself without knowing that he had been there too. That’s a comfort, at least, and he’s about to set the magazine aside and call his mum when a blurb about 5 Seconds of Summer playing the MTV Video Music Awards in the corner of one of the pages catches his eye. Michael hadn’t mentioned anything about it. He reads the paragraph quickly, counting the days off on his fingers. If the awards show is that Sunday… He feels an irrational prickle of anger that no one had said anything to him about it.

Does the fact that no one has mentioned it to him specifically mean Michael has another date? They haven’t made any part of their relationship official; Ashton’s mood darkens instantly at the thought of Michael walking the red carpet with someone else on his arm. Not that he actually wants to go - he hasn’t been asked, he has no idea if Michael even intended to ask him - but it would have been nice to at least find out from Michael himself, not the goddamn Daily Mail. Annoyance creeps in and settles around his throat like a vice; he tries calling home so he can hear a friendly voice but it goes straight to voicemail. It must be later than he thought at home. He leaves a jumbled message saying that he’s arrived safely and having a good time, he misses them, he’ll call soon so he can talk to everyone.

He doesn’t mention the VMAs. Lauren will figure it out herself - if she hasn’t already - and he’ll just have to… What? If Michael has another date, what? And then he realizes how out of his element he is, here. He hasn’t brought anything he can wear; everything he’d packed was practical, jeans and shorts and t-shirts. He’s sitting cross-legged on the bed with the magazines spread out around him, wondering what to do, when there’s a knock at the door. When he bends to look through the little round peephole in the door he sees Harry on the other side and opens it immediately, glad to see a friendly face. That’s something he never expected to think, too, that Harry Styles would be a friendly face.

“You look exhausted,” Harry comments, looking fresh-faced and alert himself. He’s got a bundle of garment bags in his arms and a duffel thrown over his shoulder; he dumps them all on the bed and - seeing the magazines - says, “Welcome to Hollywood, babe. You’ll drive yourself crazy reading that drivel.”

Ashton looks at the bags that he’s brought skeptically. “What’s all this?” he asks.

Harry blinks at him for a moment. “You’re coming on Sunday, right? The VMAs? Thought you might need some help finding something to wear so you don’t turn into a pumpkin.” The way Harry speaks is slow and deliberate, always choosing his words carefully even in private.

“I thought,” Ashton says. “I haven’t been invited yet, technically. Like. I just found out that they were happening five minutes ago.”

Harry purses his baby-pink lips, smudging the carefully applied layer of lipstick slightly. He must have just come from a photo shoot or something. “Of course you’re invited,” Harry tells him, methodically sorting through the bags and beginning to unzip them. “If Michael doesn’t want to ask you then you’ll come with me. But first let’s find you something to wear.”

“Don’t you have a date?”

“The person I want to ask doesn’t want anything to do with me. So,” Harry laughs, “Let’s worry about you, yes?” He takes one of the shirts out of its bag and holds it up to Ashton’s chest, frowning. They go through several of the bags, making a pile of ‘yes’ and ‘maybe’ options. After a while they take a break to order room service for lunch and a man in an impressively white chef’s uniform, complete with the hat, brings them a wide array of sliced fruits and finger sandwiches. The time goes by so quickly with Harry for company that it barely feels like noon when Michael comes back, much less like three in the afternoon.

Harry’s sprawled out on the unused bed surrounded by clothing. He looks up when the door opens and grins, flipping onto his stomach with his chin perched in his hands daintily. “Who let you in here,” Michael says, reaching out to ruffle Harry’s hair on his way past. The mattress dips under his weight when he sits on the bed next to Ashton. He takes in the pile of clothes and then the magazines on the nightstand slowly, sucking in his bottom lip when he puts the two together. “Oh,” he says.

“I think that’s my phone,” Harry says, eyebrows knit together in an expression of concern. He steps outside quietly with his lips pressed tightly together.

Ashton puts on his most determined face, horribly aware of how pinched and awful he looks when he’s upset. “So when were you planning to tell me about the VMAs?” he asks, keeping his tone purposely even. It’s not - it’s not that he’s mad, even. He’s afraid to hope in case he ends up let down again; he thinks it would hurt more this time, after everything that’s happened, because the first time he really did it to himself.

“I was going to ask you to be my date tonight,” Michael says, eyes trained on the ground. “I wanted to do it, like, properly and everything. Ask you to be my boyfriend.” He fumbles with the lanyard poking out of his pocket, twisting it around his fingers the whole time Ashton’s trying to figure out what he’s supposed to say to that. And Michael keeps looking at him hopefully now, between him and the pile of the clothes on the spare bed.

The resolve he’d been building up all afternoon to be angry drains out of him. “I - Yes,” he says quickly. “To both things. The awards show and the, um. The boyfriend thing.”

“Really? Like,” Michael holds onto both his hands loosely, “For sure?” And Ashton wants to say that he’s never been more sure of anything, that he wants - but as it turns out he’s easily distracted, forgetting what he meant to say as soon as Michael’s mouth is on his. This is all he wants to do, ever - this, kissing in this hotel room, on this expensive bed. There hadn’t been much time the night before; they’d both been too exhausted to do more than making out until he could barely keep his eyes open.

Now he’s wide awake, skin set aflame with every touch as they fall back on the mattress. Michael’s hands are quick to unbutton the shirt he’d put on before room service had arrived, grazing his bare stomach and chest with each button he unfastens. Before things can get any more heated Michael’s phone rings. “Don’t answer it,” Ashton groans, pulling back slightly to let Michael pull the phone out of his jeans pocket quickly. He steps out into the hall after Harry while Michael paces the room and says ‘Yeah’ and ‘Okay’ a thousand times to whoever’s on the other end of the phone, looking annoyed. They go together to the room at the end of the hall with the vending machines and the ice maker and feed bills into the machine to get some candy bars. “Stop laughing,” Ashton complains as the machine rejects his bill for the third time. American money is so confusing to him.

“Just let me do it,” Harry says, taking it from him and smoothing it out before flipping it around the right way. “So how are things,” he asks, calmly feeding another bill into the machine to buy a bag of pretzels.

Ashton smiles and tells him, “Looks like you’re going to have to find your own date to the VMAs.”

His mum makes him stay home the next day too.

It’s a carbon copy of the day before, right down to Ashton dragging his duvet down the stairs and setting up camp on the couch to watch television all day. He doesn’t even bother getting on the computer; he doesn’t want to go on Myspace ever again - especially since he set that song as his profile song - and he knows that he’ll only make himself crazy if he keeps going on Michael’s page. So he spends the morning channel surfing between children’s shows and the local news station trying to decide if death by Teletubby would be more painless than the news anchors’ helmet hair. He doesn’t understand why everyone keeps acting so concerned about him. It’s not like he’s actually ill - he just looks like hell every time he glances in the mirror. Even so he thinks he looks more sulky and brooding than sick.

“Better safe than sorry,” his mum had said, looking at his pale, drawn face and under-eye bags with a frown. He’d forgotten how little there is to do staying at home sick. None of the DVDs in the rack next to the television are appealing to him. He’s never been able to get into the flashy afternoon talk shows exposing cheaters and paternity test results, either. For most of the morning he stays cuddled under his duvet and stares blankly at the screen. Depression sets in like a lazy housecat around his shoulders, making him feel brittle and breakable. He doesn’t get how he has the right to be upset at all when it had been his decision to end things the way they are. It gnaws away at him. Maybe he’d been too harsh - he’s been playing that moment over and over again in his head, how gently Michael had kissed him - but he was only trying to protect himself.

And somehow the nasty little voice in the back of his head asks what he’s trying to run from, exactly, and he has no answer to that. It’s easier not to think about - Ashton keeps thinking if he ignores it for long enough, it will get easier - but the thoughts keep popping up at every opportunity. He doesn’t think he can take it back now. In the afternoon he finds a marathon of _The O.C._ and spends most of the season wondering what would have happened if Seth Cohen had fallen in love with Ryan instead of Summer. He’s definitely not thinking about it as, like. A metaphor for his current situation. That would be incredibly transparent and more than a little pathetic, so yeah. Maybe he’s thinking about it that way since Michael does have some distinctly Ryan Atwood-ish personality traits and more than once he’s compared himself to Seth Cohen. Only things don’t work themselves out quite as neatly in the real world as they do in TV shows, so he still has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing.

He’s thinking about it when there’s a knock at the front door that pulls him out of his reverie. The show’s gone to commercial anyway, so he crawls out from under the duvet to answer it. As soon as he opens the door he immediately regrets it. “No,” he says, and begins to close the door.

“Ash, don’t shut me out like this. Please talk to me,” Michael pleads with him. He looks about as shitty as Ashton feels, which he’s maybe a little deserving of, but he can’t handle this right now. His brain short-circuits whenever he’s around Michael. He makes bad decisions and does things he ends up regretting and he just - can’t, he can’t keep this up anymore - wants one thing to get easier. He can’t stand the way it feels to have Michael looking at him like this; all sad-eyed and sleep-deprived and then he says, “Please.”

Something breaks inside Ashton’s chest - he opens the door reluctantly and says, “Come inside then.” He doesn’t try to explain the blankets on the couch or the talk show blaring at full volume in the living room. “What is there to talk about?” he asks, leaving the piled-up blankets purposefully as a barricade between them.

Michael looks anywhere but at him. “I just - I thought there was something,” he says softly. “Like. Everything… I thought you liked me back.” And there’s a new patch of skin growing over the scrape on his knee; it’s pink and shiny and raw, in various degrees of healing over still with some parts jagged. Ashton folds his hands in his lap. He wants to reach out and touch that small, wounded patch of skin. He doesn’t. Everything feels like too much, scraping away at the leftover pieces of his heart after everything that had unfolded over the weekend. Small, petty and desperate, he waits for Michael to say something else.

“You thought wrong,” he says to fill the silence. It’s a lie, cold and bitter untruth that rolls off his tongue heavily. “I mean. I don’t have time - You’re always asking for more and more and I have nothing to give.” The words are ugly and harsh. He can’t look at Michael - knows he’s hurting him, knows the weight of his words like he’d rehearsed them a thousand times - or he’ll crumble.

“I,” Michael says. “Why are you acting like this?”

Ashton forces himself to look. He makes himself look at Michael blinking, very much like he’s trying not to cry, his shaking hands picking at the hem of his shorts and his trembling lower lip. “What are you doing here?” he asks. “Why did you come?” This isn’t - Michael isn’t supposed to be sitting in his living room about to cry. He’d tried so hard to keep those parts of his life separate. To set a good example for Harry and Lauren; he hadn’t wanted to let anyone in at all so that none of them could be hurt, so he wouldn’t get hurt when another person he’d allowed himself to love eventually left. His heartbeat is so loud it feels like the only sound in the world.

“I wanted - I, um. Was worried you were avoiding school ‘cause of me. I brought you the stuff you missed from yesterday,” Michael tells him, fumbling with the straps of his backpack until he’s wrestled it off both shoulders. He unzips it and pulls something out, sets the folder of assignments on the coffee table. “So yeah, there’s that. And I just… I wanted to see you. It’s stupid.”

“Yeah,” Ashton agrees, chewing the inside of his cheek. The sting of it keeps him anchored to his seat; he feels like he’ll float away otherwise, give into the urge he’s feeling to close the gap between them and apologize, kiss Michael until neither of them can breathe. He’s not allowed to want this anymore. “Sorry,” he says after a moment. “That was mean. I’m not…” He picks at his ragged cuticles, turning one of them bloody and wincing as he rips off a hangnail. The air is thick with things unsaid between them. If he doesn’t find an exit strategy for this conversation soon he’s going to choke on them. “Maybe you should,” he starts to say. But he doesn’t - he doesn’t want Michael to go - and the words die on his tongue.

He hates the hurt look Michael’s giving him, the way he shifts on the edge of the couch cushion uncomfortably like he doesn’t know what he’s allowed anymore. “I just, um,” Michael says. “I don’t understand - like, I’m sorry? That there are girls… whatever. I don’t - I don’t know.” His forearm is scrubbed red with the faint ghost of permanent marker still on his skin. More girls’ numbers then or - more likely - their Myspace URLs. Ashton hadn’t missed the sudden spike in the number of people on his friends list. It’s selfish of him to even care. He hates that he notices, the traces of ink hidden under the bracelets on both wrists barely visible. Hates that he notices any of it.

“Can you just,” Ashton sighs.

He doesn’t want to say ‘leave me alone’ because he doesn’t think he can handle it. And the hesitation shows through - he’s in a war with himself and it feels like everyone knows it. “Look, I’m going to say something really stupid unless you stop me,” Michael tells him. There’s a brief pause in which Ashton tries to untangle his rapid-cycling thoughts - all please and want and stay - but he can’t manage to make himself say anything. “I love you,” Michael says very quietly. “I just - I thought. I wanted you to know.”

The last fragment of Ashton’s heart bursts into flame inside his chest. Before he can stop himself he’s moving closer, pulling Michael to him and kissing him desperately - slightly off-balance and weighted heavily in Michael’s favor on the couch - and he can’t. Michael loves him. That’s a mistake, it’s - It can’t happen. This is not how things are supposed to be ending between them. It was supposed to be easier than this, he thinks, but then they’re kissing and all he knows for a few minutes are Michael’s arms around him and their shared breathing. The duvet ends up kicked onto the floor. He’s in Michael’s lap, making out with him in his own living room when he’s supposed to be ending things. _The O.C._ is still playing in the background, Something Corporate as the featured song for this episode just to make things more devastating as he pulls back and says, “Wait. I can’t -”

Then his mum’s car is pulling into the driveway and Michael says, “Please don’t do this.” Ashton can hear the van doors sliding open, Harry and Lauren’s chatter about their days. He swallows hard thinking of his siblings - and then in turn his mum - and he knows he has to do it. It doesn’t feel good at all. He slides off Michael’s lap, back to his own side of the couch.

“I think you should go,” he says evenly. Each word is careful and measured so his voice doesn’t betray him - it feels like his lungs will give out any second now - and he tells himself he only has to maintain his composure long enough to get Michael to leave. He puts his hands in the pockets of his pyjama pants as he stands to hide the fact that they’re shaking. His mum comes through the front door followed by his siblings and he greets them cheerfully. “Hi, mum,” he says, giving her a quick hug before bending to embrace each of his siblings separately. “Michael was just leaving,” he tells her pointedly, taking note of the bags of groceries in her arms. “I’ll help you with the rest of it in a second.”

Ashton follows Michael out to the front step where the rest of the bags are waiting to be brought inside. “Ash, please -” Michael says, reaching for his hands. “I know you’re scared but I just,” he says, blinking hard to keep the tears from falling. Ashton shakes his head. He can’t - he’s gotten too caught up in this already, been too irresponsible - he can’t think of anything to say so he just stares hard until Michael shrinks away from him, the tears that have begun to roll down his cheek glistening in the sunlight. “You’re making a mistake. I love you,” he says, swiping at both cheeks with the backs of his hands.

“Just go,” Ashton says flatly. He bends to pick up an armful of grocery bags and goes inside the house without looking back. When his mum asks who his friend was - because mums always do, just know somehow - he sighs and goes, “We’re not friends. He was just bringing me the homework I missed,” and then sets the bags down on the counter. He knows he’s crying; he can feel the hot trails that his tears are burning down his face but he’s doing his best to ignore them. He helps to put the groceries away, too, filling the cupboards with cereal and fruit snacks, putting a new box of trash bags under the sink. It feels like there’s a hole in his chest and everything good is slowly leaking out of him.

At dinner he says he’s not hungry and hides out in his room, ignoring requests from Lauren for help with her math homework and from Harry to play Cluedo before bed. The only thing Ashton wants to do is lie on his bed and hide under the covers forever. He holes up in his room until after both his siblings have gone to bed, hoping that he’ll feel better if everyone just leaves him alone. He should have known better than to think that his mum hadn’t noticed his mood earlier. She comes into his room without knocking and sits on the edge of the bed, pulling the covers back from where he’s pulled them over his head to hide from everyone.

“So are you going to tell me what happened to make you so upset, or am I going to have to guess?” she asks, smoothing a hand through his hair lovingly.

He reaches for a tissue on the nightstand and blows his nose into it miserably. “It’s nothing, mum,” he says. “Just - Michael. He kind of ruined my life but it’s fine, whatever. Stupid high school stuff, don’t worry about it.” And if he keeps saying it then one day maybe he’ll believe it. For now it feels sore in his chest every time he thinks of Michael and he feels stupid crying over it, stupid for needing a hug from his mum to feel better when he’s the one who had gone and wrecked everything. Wisely, his mum doesn’t press the issue any further. She lets him stay home from school the rest of the week - he does go to work, though, preferring the quiet routine of stocking shelves to the noise and bustle of being home in the evenings - and by the week’s end when she asks him how he’s feeling, all he says is “I hate Michael Clifford,” and leaves it at that.

“Dude,” Michael says when they get out of the car, “I think that’s Travis Barker.”

Ashton climbs out after him and thanks the driver for holding the door. It’s been a weird week - they’ve been to so many events leading up to the VMAs, smiling and shaking hands and pretending he knows who any of these people are - and he’s noticed that a lot of the people working behind the scenes don’t get enough thanks. “Are you sure?” he asks, squinting against the bright sunlight and camera flashes. Michael had come prepared and puts his sunglasses on, offering a second pair to Ashton. He slides them on and says “Thanks,” leans up to kiss Michael’s cheek before they are bombarded by the press.

Calum and Luke tumble out of the car followed closely by Louis and Zayn. Calum’s eyes go wide and round and he says, “That is Travis Barker, holy shit. I’m gonna die.” He clings onto Luke’s hand tightly as they walk from the car, blinking at every flash that goes off in their direction. No Direction hadn’t been nominated for anything but - in what Ashton thinks is a blatantly obvious move on their part - they had invited Louis to come as… Ashton doesn’t know if he’s supposed to be Luke or Calum’s date, though he’s not sure it matters. Louis stiffens up as soon as he sees Harry on the red carpet, posing for a photo with the country-rock singer Liam Payne who he’d been on X Factor with. He stands off to the side with Ashton and Zayn while the band stops for a photo, scowling.

“Cheer up,” Ashton tells him. “We’re rubbing elbows with the rich and famous.” While Michael answers a few questions for the cameras, he glances around looking for Harry again. There’s a tug on the back of his shirt and he turns, finding Harry behind him with Liam in tow. “Hey you,” he says, accepting the hug that Harry offers and shaking Liam’s hand when they’re introduced. “You look good,” he tells Harry, who’s wearing a blazer over a white v-neck that dips low to show off his tattoos.

“Figured I’d come over and say hello before we went inside,” Harry says. He’s pointedly not looking at Louis - wearing a pair of bright red skinny jeans and a button-up with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows - but the effort is failing on both of their parts not to notice each other. Someone waves another camera in their faces and Ashton puts on his best smile as they pose for a group photo, sliding an arm around both Harry’s and Louis’s waists and feeling utterly like a third wheel stuck between them. He’ll have to remember to find a copy of that picture later to see if it looks as strained as he thinks it does. Before he’s let out of the embrace, Harry slips something into his pocket and whispers “I don’t want to see you again until you’ve used all of those.” He winks and drags Liam off to another photo set-up before Ashton can say anything.

He sticks his hand in his pocket and feels around for whatever it is Harry’s given him. “Condoms,” he tells Louis. “He’s given me condoms.”

Zayn snickers. Ashton doesn’t mention it when Michael comes back after giving yet another interview - and it’s been the theme of the week, really, brief moments alone punctuated by the world demanding to know every detail of their lives - but he’s sure his face gives it away. Michael wraps an arm around him as they walk the rest of the way to the doors. “There are so many famous people here,” he says, shifting his arm down to slide his hand into Ashton’s back pocket. Just before they’re ready to go inside another camera crew approaches them. Michael sighs - he’d been enthusiastic about all the other interviews, eager to talk about their upcoming album and shamelessly plug Louis and Zayn to whoever would listen - and shifts uncomfortably against Ashton.

“Michael, hi,” the interviewer says, dressed in a white t-shirt and a vest over skinny jeans. “I’m doing interviews for Buzznet, can I get a quick one with you?” He’s got that long shaggy hair that’s in style, with blonde highlights, and basically looks like every other guy their age in a band. Ashton can’t figure out why Michael is acting so uncomfortable - or why if he’s so uncomfortable he agrees to the interview. He stands off to the side while they set up, facing the camera away from the sun. “Alex from All Time Low, on the red carpet at the VMAs. So I’m here with Michael from 5 Seconds of Summer,” the guy says once they’re rolling. “You look hot tonight. Who are you looking forward to seeing?”

And Ashton bites the inside of his lip hard to stop from saying something rash at this guy’s comments. “They used to have a thing,” Calum says in his ear. “Don’t worry, Alex is just an asshole.” That doesn’t make him feel any better. Michael mouths the word ‘sorry’ to him in between takes; he’s charming on camera and makes sure to plug ‘Best Song Ever’ and Ashton notices the way he leans away every time Alex moves in close with the microphone. He wants to get inside - he wants to go anywhere but here, in this moment, watching some prick from some nobody band hit on his boyfriend - and instead he has to wait while they talk about Katy Perry and the nominees for Video of the Year. It’s been obvious from the start that he doesn’t belong at an event like this. It would be worse, he thinks, if he were dating someone like Harry.

Louis bristles silently beside him when Harry and Liam both wave as they go inside, flanked on both sides by bodyguards. It makes sense that they’d have added security; Harry’s video for ‘Little Things’ is nominated for Best Pop Video and Video of the Year. Ashton doesn’t know what Liam is nominated for - he’s pretty sure that coming as Harry’s date is part of some publicity thing - but he cleans up well, handsome and sharp in a charcoal grey suit. “Fuckin’ wankers,” Louis swears under his breath.

“Don’t swear,” Ashton tells him out of habit.

Michael turns back to them after he’s done the interview and wraps himself around Ashton for a moment. “That was awkward,” he says apologetically. “I didn’t know he was going to be here, sorry.” And before Ashton might have cared a bit - he probably would have left, honestly - but now he rolls his eyes and takes Michael’s hand. Their seats are toward the middle of the front section, meaning they have to walk by all the important people seated behind them in jeans and sneakers. It’s all a bit surreal - Jay-Z and Beyoncé sitting one row ahead of Pete from Fall Out Boy - and Ashton’s sure that he’s going to have splotches superimposed over his field of vision every time he blinks for weeks after this. They’re seated three rows and to the left of Harry and Liam.

Louis and Zayn keep up a running commentary of everyone that arrives. Zayn goes very quiet when he sees Beyoncé sitting behind them, sinking low into his seat. “That’s Beyoncé,” he says reverently, covering his face with his hands. Each of them has their own starstruck moment - the funniest of which is Luke’s squeal when he sees Slash seated two seats over from Miley Cyrus - and before long things get underway with a sketch featuring Britney Spears and, oddly, Jonah Hill. Ashton doesn’t find it very funny. The crowd goes wild when Britney comes on, though, shrill and deafening and even though he doesn’t have any personal stake in the awards show himself he starts to become a bundle of nerves with everyone else.

He doesn’t know why he’s so nervous. He’d come along to the rehearsals and watched it all then, too, but it hadn’t been the real thing. Britney Spears had been wearing sweatpants at rehearsals. Now everyone’s dressed up and they’re handing out actual awards to cheers and applause across the entire room. All of them - even Louis, Ashton notices - leap to their feet and applaud when Harry takes Best Male Video, looking flushed and a little starstruck himself as he accepts the award from Demi Moore. The show passes in a blur of performances and awards handed out for songs Ashton’s never even heard of, the commercial breaks a welcome addition so that he can catch his breath for a moment.

Finally, near the end of the show Lauren Conrad and Chace Crawford take the stage. Ashton thinks for a moment about how his sister would absolutely die if she were here - he’s seen more episodes of _Laguna Beach_ than he’s ever cared to - and they announce the nominees for Best New Artist. A clip from each of the videos plays while someone runs onstage and hands them an envelope containing the name of the winner. Michael squeezes his hand tightly; they’re all holding hands across the row, one heartbeat between them, because ‘She Looks So Perfect’ is nominated and they’re seconds away from finding out if they’ve won.

The two presenters put their heads together to read the card and then they say into the microphone, “And the award goes to 5 Seconds of Summer,” and it’s like a bomb has gone off. Everyone around them leaps to their feet.

The song plays and the cameras pan in on where they’re sitting; Michael pulls Ashton in and kisses him messily before he pulls back and goes, “Holy fuck, we really won,” and Calum has to drag him by the arm onstage to accept their award. “Thank you,” Michael says once the applause has died off enough to be heard. “Really, thank you guys for voting for us and believing in this band. You guys are incredible. Um, thank you to our parents as well for always, like, driving us to gigs before we got our drivers’ licenses and a big thank you to my boyfriend Ash who’s here with me tonight. I love you. Rock on,” and then Louis and Zayn are catcalling him and hamming it up for the cameras that are suddenly pointed at them. The cameras swing back around to the stage for Paris Hilton’s entrance for the introduction of the Best Pop Video nominees.

As soon as Michael’s back to their seats Ashton grabs him and kisses him thoroughly. “I’m in love with you,” he says after they’ve finished, both slightly out of breath. It feels like the wrong place to be saying it - there are so many people around, some with their camera phones trained on them still - but it’s honest.

Michael says, “I know,” and kisses the top of his head. “I’ve always known.” They watch as Harry Styles loses to Britney Spears for Best Pop Video and Video of the Year, and things are finally as they should be. In the morning there will be headlines about their relationship - Ashton’s latest hobby is writing them in his head, imagining what people will say - and somehow it all fits into place neatly. He wonders which shot they’ll use first, the one of Michael accepting the award onstage or one of them kissing when he’d gotten back to their seats. It doesn’t really matter; Ashton knows that when he gets home there will be a scrapbook on the coffee table in the living room with magazine articles and his mum will pretend not to hum along when he turns the kitchen radio on at dinner. She’d forgiven him when he called, said she was sorry for reacting the way she had but that it had come as a surprise.

It surprises him to realize that he’s finally forgiven himself. He hadn’t known he needed forgiveness until now. And it’s good - he feels new again, lighter. Once the cameras are put away and everyone is getting ready to leave for the various afterparties being held all across Los Angeles, Ashton excuses himself from the group. “I’ll be right back,” he says, ignoring Harry’s raised eyebrow as he walks through the crowd carefully. He has to narrowly skirt around someone carrying a boom on the way to his destination, heart pounding with sudden nerves. He feels like he’s going to get swallowed up by the ground as he approaches. After taking a deep breath, he turns to the tattooed man next to him and taps him on the shoulder lightly. “Hey,” he says. “You’re Travis Barker, right?”

And Travis Barker - the drummer for blink-182 - says “Yeah, man. You’re dating that - the 5 Seconds of Summer kid, right?” Ashton nods numbly, stuck in shock that the drummer of a band he’s known since he was a teenager knows who he is. “Tell your boyfriend, good job on the award. I like that band,” he says. “Come here, let’s get a picture,” and he slings an arm over Ashton’s shoulders, easy as pie, and suddenly Ashton is glad he’d held onto Michael’s phone before they’d come inside and forgotten to give it back. He pulls it out and unlocks it before handing it over to someone who snaps the photo for them.

“Um, awesome, thank you,” he says to Travis. When he finds his friends again he can’t keep the smile off his face. Michael makes grabby hands for him, as if the five or so minutes he’d been gone were actually an eternity. “Okay, I have to show you something.” He pulls out Michael’s phone and counts the seconds it takes for the realization to sink in - on his way back he’d set the lock screen photo to the one he’s just taken - and all he can do is laugh and shake his head when Michael gasps and covers his mouth with both hands. “And he said he liked your band.”

“This is a joke, right?” Michael says, staring at the picture like he’s just seen god. Ashton shakes his head. “I think I just peed,” he says weakly. “Travis Barker likes my band. Travis Barker’s heard of my band.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can come shout at me, as always, on [Tumblr](http://anxietycalling.tumblr.com).


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